2 July 2003: Come on Without, Come on Within

So about that revolution in my head...

It's all Ace's fault, of course. 

During his visit last month, Ace recommended two books, Ishmael and The Story of B, both written by a guy I'd never heard of named Daniel Quinn.  Mind-blowing new ideas and perspectives, he said.  I recognized the way he was talking about it - it was the missionary zeal that all the Tabrizi get when we discover a new reality that we know must to be shared with the others, that we know must become a permanent part of our perspective and our common language.  I remember seeing the same spark in Argus when he discovered Taoism and punk rock; in the Khan when he discovered NeuroLinguistic Programming and go; in myself when I discovered Kabbalah and LSD; in Moly... well, all the time in Moly (that's his magic). 

So about a week after Ace's visit, I ordered a copy of The Story of B from a local independent bookseller.  (Fuck Amazon!  Fuck Barnes & Noble!  Support your local independent bookseller!  Wahoo!)  It arrived.  I read it.  As soon as I'd finished, I read Ishmael, and as soon as I finished Ishmael, I read its sequel, My Ishmael.  As soon as I finished My Ishmael, I read Quinn's autobiography, Providence, and as soon as I finished that, I read another Quinn book, Beyond Civilization.  I was so into reading as much Quinn as I could get my hands on that I offered Dragon Lady first crack at the new Harry Potter book, and then, after she finished it in two days, it sat neglected for another three days while I finished Providence and plowed through Beyond Civilization.  By the time I'd finished the Potter book, I'd located another Quinn book, a novel called After Dachau, which I finished reading Saturday.  I've got his new one, The Holy, on order from my local independent bookseller.

I was only about a quarter of the way through The Story of B when I realized that these books were going to change my life forever.  I was amazed at the inhuman patience and restraint that Ace had shown in not bringing a copy of the book with him on his visit, shoving it into my hands as soon as he saw me, and screaming "Read this now!  Read it now!"   

George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends (better known as the Quakers) described his conversion to Christianity as a discovery that Christ "spoke to his condition."  By the time I was a quarter of the way through The Story of B, I understood what Fox meant in a way I'd never understood it before.  I'd found a body of teachings that spoke to my condition.  As far back as I can remember in this lifetime - I mean, even in my earliest childhood - I knew there was something rotten afoot.  There was something monstrously wrong with the culture I lived in - and not just American culture, either.  It was deeper and more pervasive than that.  I'm not talking about social injustice - that's just an effect, not a cause.  I've always been leery of politics, not because I'm apathetic (far from it), but because I've always known that it's deeper than that.  The problem is a cultural mindset that runs so deep that no political party questions it.  Liberals and Conservatives, or warring nations, have never seemed like Good Guys and Bad Guys to me; from where I'm standing, every political struggle is Saruman's uruk-hai vs. Sauron's orcs.

I'm an anarchist because it's always been obvious to me that laws and governments don't work for humans, have never worked for humans, and will never work for humans.  The way we're living doesn't work.  And this is obvious, because it's obvious that the humans in this culture have been vexed to madness.

I don't want to be told what to do or how to live, and I don't want anyone else to be forced to live in a way that they don't want to live, either. I’ve known all my life that my dissatisfaction with our culture - my endless passionate loathing of government, cops, politicians, lawyers, bosses, management, nations, human law, capitalism, communism, conservatives, liberals, censorship, forced schooling, prisons, wage slavery, full-time jobs, and anyone who wants to force anyone else to live or not live in any particular way - does not reflect a flaw in me. I’m fine the way I am. I hate these things because there’s something wrong with them, not because there's something wrong with me. I hate these things because they encroach upon my freedom and well-being, and upon the freedom and well-being of most of humanity.

All my life I’ve known this, and I’ve spent my whole life alternately furious and depressed because almost no one else seems to see what I see, and I’ve never been able to get it together to explain it all properly. It’s just such a daunting task. The memes that form the foundation of this culture are so deeply ingrained, and so old… they predate all major languages currently in use, so the languages themselves support the memes. It seemed as if I’d have to write a whole book to explain what I’ve always known in my gut… or a whole bunch of books… and it was beyond me, because there were too many pieces I didn’t understand, I couldn’t explain it all, how it got this messed up or exactly what’s messed up about it… I didn’t arrive at my knowledge in a rational, step-by-step way, and I couldn’t make it all come together in a format designed to walk someone step-by-step through a rational process of discovering and removing their own cultural blinders.

But Daniel Quinn could. Daniel Quinn did. Daniel Quinn filled in all the missing pieces for me, confirmed everything I’d suspected and showed me related things that I hadn’t suspected yet, cleared up old mysteries, showed me connections I hadn’t spotted, and put my gut knowledge into the language of the head. I don’t have to figure out how to articulate all that stuff now – Quinn did it already, and now all I have to do is get as many people as possible to read his books.

And, of course, I can build on Quinn’s work in my own work, in my own life. It dovetails so well with what I’ve been trying to get at in aikido, and with the stuff I do want to write… I’ve been paralyzed by the overwhelming nature of the task of figuring out and articulating The Whole Darned Thing, like building a cathedral from scratch. But I don’t have to do the Whole Darned Thing myself, after all. The stone’s already quarried, the foundation laid, the walls are being built. I can get busy on the parts that are within my personal scope – the windows, maybe, or the flying buttresses.

Anyway. It’s been taking me forever to get this entry written, because there’s just too much to say. But I don’t have to say it all right now. Read the books. I’ll keep on ranting in future entries and essays, as I’m inspired to do so.

Which books to read? In what order? Here’s my handy guide:

Ishmael
Read Ishmael first. It’s the first one he wrote, and it lays the groundwork for the others. Reading Ishmael first is the best way to get the most out of Quinn’s work, in terms of building the cathedral from the foundation up, and in terms of treating yourself to a very nice progression of mind-blowing ideas. Don’t be put off by the personality of the narrator – Quinn deliberately makes the guy clueless, the way Castaneda deliberately portrays himself as clueless (and for similar reasons – he needs a narrator who will ask the kind of questions that the most clueless of readers would ask in his shoes). It sets you up really well for the much more likeable narrator of the sequel.

My Ishmael
This is the sequel to Ishmael. Read this one second. It’s got a whole new set of ideas that build on and complement the ideas in Ishmael. Like I said, it’s got a different narrator, whom I found charming and delightful.

The Story of B
This was actually written in between Ishmael and My Ishmael, but trust me, the effect will be even better if you do Ishmael, then My Ishmael, then The Story of B. Ishmael and My Ishmael really follow one after the other. The Story of B is a whole new setting and set of characters, and is a more complex and sophisticated work, with a very different angle to it. One funny thing about The Story of B is its structure. All three books, Ishmael, My Ishmael, and The Story of B, consist to a large extent of socratic dialogues between a teacher and a student (Ishmael and My Ishmael feature the same teacher but two different narrator/students; The Story of B features a different teacher and yet another narrator/student). But the teacher in The Story of B also gives public lectures, which are attended by the student. The texts of all the lectures are at the back of the book, in an appendix called "The Public Teachings." But the book doesn’t work if one reads the story first and then the appendix. To really get the most out of the story and the ideas therein, one must read each lecture at the point at which it is delivered in the story. So every now and then, in the course of the story, the narrator sits down in a lecture hall, and there is an asterisk and a footnote that says something like "The full text of this lecture appears on pages 315-327." The best way to read the book is to turn immediately to page 315, read to page 327, then go back and resume the story from just after the asterisk. To this end, I found it useful to employ two bookmarks. The only reason I can imagine that Quinn set the book up in this odd way is that it would be hilariously in character for the narrator to have done so.

Beyond Civilization
This is a follow-up to the Ishmael - My Ishmael - Story of B trilogy. The books in the trilogy are novels – that is, all the lessons are presented as the speeches and dialogues of fictional characters, and the characters are making and hearing the speeches and having the dialogues as part of their participation in plots. In fact, the plot of The Story of B is downright gripping. Beyond Civilization, on the other hand, has a nonfiction format. Quinn himself is our narrator, addressing us directly (he’s a pretty likeable narrator, too, though not as likeable as the narrator of My Ishmael). He wrote Beyond Civilization in response to the many burning questions that readers of the trilogy had asked him over the years – of which the most common one was, unsurprisingly, "Yes, but now that I know this, what can I do?" It’s a great book. Short and easy to read (each page is a chapter). Brings it all together, with some brilliant (and very aikido) solutions to the madness of our culture. It only makes sense if you’ve read the trilogy, because it’s so steeped in the language and concepts he introduces in the trilogy. Because of this, it also provides a great demonstration of the vistas that are open to one when one takes the language and concepts of the trilogy as one’s foundation – which is exactly why I want you, and everyone else, to read this stuff and integrate the language and concepts into your way of thinking and talking about the world.

Those four are the "must read" books, the body of work that has blown my mind and changed my life. If you read them and want more of Quinn, here are the two others I’ve read so far:

Providence
This is Quinn’s autobiography. It’s short, which speaks well of him. It’s also a relatively early work, the next thing he wrote after Ishmael. It’s not mind-blowing the way the other stuff is, but it’s interesting seeing where some of his inspiration came from, and his insights into romance are spot-on and sometimes hilarious. Providence also includes the best description I’ve ever read of the experience of Chokmah, the second sephira of the Tree of Life, though of course Quinn doesn’t call it that, he calls it an experience of "the god speaking," or "the fire of life."

After Dachau
This is a novel, in a much more traditional sense that the Ishmael books – that is, rather than a megadose of mind-blowing ideas bound together by a simple story, it’s a great story with a few powerful ideas in it. It does, of course, contain a couple of lessons that relate to the lessons of his other work. After Dachau is Quinn’s contribution to the canon of man-vs-dystopia classics that includes Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and V for Vendetta. It’s worthy of inclusion in that canon; I’d like to see it become standard reading in high school classrooms.

Okay, that’s enough for now. I think I’ll start a Quinn thread on the Moot Jungle soon, so we’ll have somewhere to discuss this stuff after you read it.

Read! Read! Discuss! Never dilute! All One God Faith!