Reality has taken a hit this October, and not just because of the presidential debate, the Supreme Court hearings, the counter-intuitive rise in the stock markets, the refusal of a substantial portion of Americans to wear masks, coronavirus miracle cures, and the revival of conspiracy theories about pedophilia and child sacrifice among top officials of the Democratic Party. It’s also because our local campgrounds are full of people with guns. We’ve been hearing rifle-fire in the hills and, on the highway, the roar of diesel pickups pulling fifth-wheel trailers. The unreality in which our newest visitors are living involves bloody theater, camo-flavored costumes, postures of dominance, and, if they’re successful, some exceptionally expensive protein in their freezers this winter.
Also, I’ve again been reading R.D. Laing’s Politics of Experience, a 1967 collection of essays that details how our civilization—even the parts we see as useful, nice, or loving—inflicts a terrible violence on the people who live in it. By the time we’ve agreed to get out of bed in the morning, get dressed, go to jobs, get married, raise children and educate them, save money for retirement, buy extended care insurance, and write out wills and advanced care directives, we’ve pretty much beaten to death the delighted toddlers we all once were, those small awed people who looked upon each sunrise with delight and joy.
Laing says that such violence makes us all crazy, because it forces us to believe in things that don’t exist. Social hierarchies are like the Velveteen Rabbit from the Dark Side: they aren’t real until they’ve been marinated in brutality. The same can be said of laws, armed forces, bureaucracies, political parties, industries, service organizations, universities, and even families. When you look at our politics, you see the barely suppressed anger and terror that we willingly live with, if only because we have been told that there are bad people in the world, and they mean to hurt us, and everything would be better if they were dead. That’s the real world for most people, and it isn’t really real.
It wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t a real real world, and if it didn’t bear silent and sad witness to the unreal world we live in.
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Laing is not considered a sane thinker at the moment. A number of biochemically oriented psychiatrists have diagnosed his neurotransmitters as seriously defective. Since he died in 1989, he can’t refute them. Crazy or not, he pointed out that culture constructs the unreal for its own purposes, and those purposes don’t often concern themselves with the hopes and dreams of individual human beings.
That notion seemed reasonable enough when I was eighteen and faced the prospect of being drafted to fight in Vietnam, and it seems reasonable enough a half-century later, when my life depends on a culturally-constructed Federal Reserve maintaining cultural faith in our culturally-constructed money so my culturally-constructed Social Security checks will buy something to eat. The system may have threatened to kill me then and may now be keeping me in groceries, but in either case my well-being or lack of it is beside the point. The point is that the culture can only continue to exist if enough people buy into its fictions rather than believing what they see.
Laing’s gift to you and me is a perspective on our world that lets us stand apart from the real and unreal and discern the difference between the two. It may come as a shock, as an eighteen-year-old, that you’re being sent off to die for the idea of freedom. But if you find yourself huddling in a foxhole because of that idea, it may save your life to know that the foxhole and the bullets whizzing above you possess considerably more reality. You’ll keep your head down, for one thing.
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When I found The Politics of Experience on the syllabus of a college writing course in 1969, it didn’t change my perceptions all that much. Going from Idaho to the East Coast had been an object lesson in unreality anyway, and I was determined to go to my unreal classes, write my unreal papers, pass my unreal exams (the fact that I had to keep a C average or lose my quite real draft deferment added incentive), get my unreal diploma and get back to the real world of Idaho as soon as I could.
I kept my head down and behaved myself, but it took dumb luck to save me. On December 1, 1969, a draft lottery was held that superseded student deferments. My number was 117, which was high enough that I wasn’t drafted, but it was a close thing. People whose number was 113 were drafted. (113 was Oliver Stone’s number. He enlisted rather than being drafted, but anyone who’s seen Platoon knows that Stone found a world where death and horror didn’t exist in the abstract.)
I stayed in school, studying hard and keeping my grades up. I discovered that if I stayed away from chemistry and calculus and took a full slate of writing and literature courses, I had no trouble getting As.
In spite of my success in academics, I had no desire to stay in that world. Before they even became possibilities, I rejected jobs and graduate programs that might have kept me in an urban and eastern environment. I didn’t go to my college graduation. After my last class, I tried to drive from Boston to Idaho in two long stints, desperate to be home. I ended up exhausted and blind in a hospital in Rock Springs, Wyoming, having abraded my corneas by wearing contact lenses for twenty-six hours. My vision came back after a day of sleep, but it didn’t improve the looks of Rock Springs.
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That first summer out of college, I worked as a wilderness ranger in the Iron Creek drainage of the Sawtooths, cleaning campgrounds, clearing trails, and talking to hundreds of people on the trail to Sawtooth and Alpine Lakes. In those conversations I realized that people in the mountains were following a script, and the script was titled We Go Backpacking and Catch a Fish, or We Camp at a High Mountain Lake and Get Rained On, or We Didn’t See a Bear but Thank God We Had the .357 Anyway. I tried to teach all of them a new script, titled Leave the Place Cleaner Than You Found It, but they mostly didn’t like it, or they didn’t like it as well as We Spent All Night Shooting the .357 at Our Empty Beer Cans, which caused the other campers to see my uniform as that of a cop. They would enthusiastically act out the Arrest Those Bad People script.
Very few of the people I met walked the Sawtooth trails without a narrative to denature their experience, and over time I began to see that those stories kept them from seeing the mountains and the lakes as the wondrous things they were. But I was an officer of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, and the SNRA, once it was established as a Forest Service alternative to a National Park, was highly regulated real estate. I was the keeper of an arena with ten thousand rules. I ensured that the SNRA was a frame for pre-recorded stories, a source of slide shows and climbing routes and guided pack trips that by definition had been previously reduced to the limits of imagination. Who was I to tell anyone to forget their preconceptions and see things as they really were?
In my uniform, I was seen as the manifestation of police power, and I learned a lot about human nature every time I was told by angry people to punish other people and make them behave.
I resisted the role of cop, having seen plenty of cops behaving badly themselves when I was a college student. I also didn’t want to ruin anyone’s day, no matter what they were doing. During my seven summers as a wilderness ranger, I issued warnings but no citations to people on motorcycles in the wilderness, people who were cutting switchbacks, people who had left plastic diapers in firepits, people who were rolling rocks down hillsides into lakes where people were fishing. I told people to cut it out—that was the legal phrase I used, translated from the Latin—and when they weren’t completely devoted to the malformed narrative that had brought them to the mountains in the first place, they did.
I never did figure out what my own role was, beyond Keeping the Place Clean and Helping People When I Could and Trying Not To Piss Off Anyone with a Gun. It was just as well. If I had really gotten into it, I might have ended up as a Career Forest Service Person, which in the vast majority of cases is a drawn-out form of death.
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Tourism is a noxious business, one that corrupts the realities of both buyer and seller. Once an experience costs money, effort is devoted to providing less experience at a higher price. Money is devoted to making some experiences more real than others. As crazy as it seems, a decked-out Sprinter Van provides a more valuable wilderness experience than just a tent and a backpack, even when the Sprinter Van spends a week parked in a wilderness parking lot. A peak that’s been climbed a thousand times is less valuable than the peak that’s never been climbed, and people spend their lives—literally—trying to find a real first ascent. The first photo taken of Mt. Regan from across Sawtooth Lake is more real—and valuable—than the ten thousandth, and every one of those ten thousand originals is more real than any Twittered or Facebooked copy. The tourist that takes a photo of Brett Wooley’s old cabin on the hill below lower Stanley tries hard to find an angle that will miss all the junk Wooley piled around it to discourage the taking of kitschy photographs.
A photo of anything reduces its value. I say this having taken a lot of photos myself, including the one that serves as the header for this blog. I try not to take the photos a tourist would take, but sometimes the result is the same. What I intended to expand the universe shrinks it. Lately I’ve begun to see a camera of any kind as a barrier to the real.
Gender theorists talk about the Male Gaze, the up and down look from an unselfconscious jerk that objectifies the people it lands on and makes them less real to themselves. One thinks of being involuntarily cast in a third-rate porn movie written by a fourth-rate scriptwriter.
You can see something similar in the Tourist Gaze, and every time a tourist looks at a Sawtooth peak and takes a photo and puts that photo in a slide show, those peaks become a little less themselves and a little bit more someone’s failure of imagination.
People see the slide show on the internet. They decide to come to Sawtooth Valley so they can put together a slide show of their own. The photo frames the real and turns it into kitsch. The cycle continues, downward, ever downward, until the whole world—if worlds can become self-aware—becomes resigned to its existence as a tawdry stage set.
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It was hard for me to look at the tourists that crowded the valley this summer and not think that they were fleeing catastrophe. Certainly, catastrophe was out there. The pandemic was beginning to tear at the flimsy fabric of consensus unreality. The president was telling lies about the virus and other things. The economy was showing signs of collapse. Jobs were gone. Schools were closed. People were buying anything that seemed solid, including real estate and Sprinter Vans, while their money was still worth something. Fear hung in the air like a wet sneeze.
R.D. Laing: “Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.” That was a sentence I underlined fifty years ago, and while my understanding of how a civilization destroys itself has changed considerably since that time, the sentence itself still holds true.