Voices

I note this week when I write I hear voices. When I'm feeling common sensical American, I hear Garrison Keilor or Jimmy Stewart; if I'm out of sorts and nostalgic, I hear the voices of the Beats: roll them bones, the Tao of Pooh, the greatest minds howl, etc. It might even be that voice you'd hear on the old Walt Disney show - the one that told about the time Old Yeller stumbled upon a skunk.

I've been reading two books the last few weeks; each carries a mood-influencing voice. The first is a John Mortimer, non-Rumpole, novel; the second, a book of blended fiction/reminiscences by Kesey.

When I read Mortimer, on the surface, there's the harried suburbanite; it doesn't matter if it's London or DC. In the face of ass-hat bosses, he always pricks the hot air of their pomposity -- where they are consumed by ambition, his only desire is to secure justice for those uponn whom the ass-hats assume the worst and won't grant the time of day. Mortimer's heroes find their niche through a competence and honesty that can't be bought or diverted for long by promises of advancement to an easier life. At best, the establishment thumbs their noses and dimisses them as non-entities; at worst, he's seen as a threat, because he can't be controlled -- in the end, things are made right -- mostly, in a twisted sort of way.

In Kesey's 'Demon Box,' he tells stories from the perspective of a person falsely seen as the hippie king, to whom all the poseurs gravitate, to either mooch, or shine in reflected faded glory. Like Mortimer, the stories are a process of distinguishing the real from the phony, the gentle from the violent. Kesey sets a tone, like James Herriott, where issues of life and death are processed through the birth and demise of animals within their relationship to humans. Kesey's farmer, like Mortimer's suburbanite, also has to be competent in his niche to retain a relative self-sufficientcy, and represent in the real world, the guise of the one we've striven to create in the forty years since the summer of love.

I know about niche-honesty from my days at the shelter. Where else in the world is it permissable to tell someone, "you stink - take a bath," without giving it a second thought? No malice intended, none taken. Where else can you witness a very dedicated volunteer comb lice from a guest's hair with humor rather than disgust? Where else do you work side by side with cops, er nurses and probation officers, where all vestiges of cover and camouflage have been swept away? Worker and guest are the same, except, for now, the worker hasn't given up on life.

The Mortimer novel, 'Quite Honesty,' unveils a recognition you come to at the shelter after time. The plot concerns 'do-gooders' who volunteer to associate with ex-con's to prevent recidivism. The book asks the simple question: why? That is, why do the same crime over and over and end up where you started? At shelter, if after much labor, working with a fella possessing a rap sheet 7 pages long, we succeeded in convincing someone to hire him, and the job starts on Monday, and in celebration, he gets wasted Saturday and Sunday, but then still wakes up on Monday morning with every intention of showing up - but doesn't after someone offers him a joint - why? Mortimer knows: excitement.

I add: impulse. The guests I knew rarely woke up intending to commit a crime - it was just when they were faced with the stark choice of going to work or something more exciting, they chose excitement. You can't call it evil - I know when there was a glorious Spring day, the temperature at 70, not a cloud in the blue sky - a real Ferris Bueller day - and I'd come trudging into the shelter after commuting the 40 miles to the office of supreme drudgery, and the fella's would come in from the woods, after a day fishing at the swimming hole, I'd think how nice it would be to live a Peter Pan life if you could get away with it. The problem for them is that they could get away with it while they were relatively young and strong - but if they were wounded, a clipped infected leg, a bad ticker, they were doomed, if there was no family left willing to take them in or they were unwilling to go.

Even if in many ways it was their choice, the economics of suburban life didn't grant much leeway to any of them who truly wanted to escape. That job, the fella, didn't show up for, rather than do drugs, was minimum wage in a discount mall. Sure, there's a dignity in working and making an effort, but even for those former guests who are doing exactly that, every day is a struggle to move beyond bare susentance, and it's 50-50 whether they sink or swim. In Mortimer's world, you survive as an honest petty criminal, where those who are their supposeded betters, the lawyers, judges, parole officers, are suspect. Their motive is not excitement - it's ego. Which is worse?

I note also an intriguing article in last month's First Things magazine called 'Groovin' on Jesus,' by Sally Thomas It's the author's contention that the counter-culture of the 60's led to a religious counter-culture today - that of the religious Right. The article, "purports to establish a direct causal effect between the Jesus Movement's impulse to re-invent culture and the activist energy of the religious right in the service of school-prayer, pro-life, and religious-liberty causes."

Hhhhmmm - there's a grain of truth here. Off the top, a cause like the home-school movement might, indeed, be a growth from the ACTS-like communes, the 60's ideals of family life. Yet, where the author see's a problem, in that an ethos "wherein citizens of the world will observe a common ethics based upon a common value system," as being imminical to a specific doctrinal application of Church authority, that is, the tried and true 'anything goes,' smear, I have no problem if committed religious observance leads to such a world. In fact, I think that's the point; what we do on earth counts, it's the real part of which we have some control, versus the promise of salvation in the next, the part that's out of reach, here and now. Mortimer and Kesey paint worlds where truth bursts pride. It occurs to me that this is the Jesuitical essence - at least that's what the voice that sounds like Charlton Heston keeps saying in my mind (the original Biblical Books-on-Tape voice, mind you, not the scary cold-dead-hands NRA voice).

Keilor, Stewart, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Disney, Heston, Mortimer, Kesey - the voices in my head. They're not the only ones - there's a mob milling around up there, each one, waiting for a chance to spill the beans. That's okay, I keep telling myself.