INTRODUCTORY COMMENTARY (on finding and re-reading this, 2023)
This “snippet” “LEFT” was written on a ship, bound for Japan, the first week of May, 1970.
It was written as “creative fiction.” I was neither at the 1968 Democratic Convention demonstrations and police brutality nor at the Kent State shootings, which happened May 4 1970. When we arrived in Japan, we filmed some demonstrations between protestors of the Vietnam War and police. I wanted to create some a fictional reflection of a character’s inner struggling with these events. It was originally titled “Todd and Al dialogue” and intended to be part of a new fiction writing after J’s the novel. But that didn’t happen and just this snippet survives, which I recently found. Reading it all these years later it seems an interesting “x-ray” into where my mind was, and the inner/outer struggle regarding society and change. This snippet is now just one characters’ musings. Certainly there are autobiographical elements. Part of J’s the novel shared my journey to Israel, living on the Kibbutz, tracing Jesus’s path through the Holy land reading the “Old” and New testaments. I had just finished reading Auerbach’s Mimesis, about his viewing the Bible as complex and ambiguous compared to Homer’s Odysseus, and now was leaving Western literature and turning East. In this snippet I’m on a ship to Japan with the goal being India, to live on Sri Auribindo’s Ashram in Pondicherry. I was reading about Gandhi’s fight for internal liberation and his nonviolent battle against external British rule. I also wonder now, looking at this writing, how much seeped into it unconsciously of my own internal work I had to do regarding my father as a volunteer policeman, his anger and physical violence, his undercover cop car with the red light. Oh, Freud you would have a blast with that.