Gus Blaisdell Collected

Foreword

Stanley Cavell

Only for the months Gus came to Cambridge and, whatever else caught his interest, participated in my seminar every week at Harvard on film and philosophy through the fall of 1984, did we spend the kind of time together that those who knew him through years in Albuquerque could count on. They will be able to testify better than I to the radiating figure Gus assumed among interlocking or mutually shunning groups of writers and intellectuals, artists and academics, and other offshoots knowable from the vicinity of the famous and inspiring bookstore he molded and tended a block or two from the University of New Mexico. Yet while Cathleen and I visited Albuquerque over a couple of decades just three or four times, for a total of probably no more than two or three weeks, the man I knew is fully continuous with the marvelous sketches rendered by Ira Jaffe and David Morris, just now reaching my inbox. They both refer to Gus’s sometimes singling out my writing for special praise. I too, of course, was sometimes struck by this. Since I was aware of the range of gifted people Gus knew, I explained this periodic favoring of my work as his taking heart for his own work, specifically, from my varying efforts to resist the isolating or insulating of philosophy and the arts from each other in so much American writing in the field. I suppose it is since his death, and noticing my eightieth year come and go, that I have come to see Gus’s unique, tireless way of weaving isolation with intimacy in a further, I would say more particular, light.

If Gus had vowed to various of the gods in his care that in case he could not complete the projects of writing he had in mind, along with myriad drafts in hand, he would nevertheless take the time to see to his artistic and intellectual and moral immortality by permanently etching his spirit on the consciousness, and beyond, of friends and strangers. Often with apparent abandon, but so characteristically, in return, incorporating a fragment associated with a companion, present or absent, of any depth or era whose talent he had tasted and had instantly and endlessly metabolized, he could hardly have been more faithful and successful in this mission. How else can one explain the eerie agreement among his untotaled company of friends and strangers concerning his learning and accomplishments (abstract and concrete), and his love of learning and accomplishment, and hence sometimes, his all the more intimately self-punishing hesitations before his ambitions for his own writing and philosophy and languages and passionate curiosities, his own angles of world sense?

There is, I take it for granted, ready agreement that Gus’s capacities for friendship and for original modes of conversation—conversations characteristically demanding of him turns of improvised impressions, some doubtless lovingly burnished over years, of characters real or abstracted or invented, from rappers to orators, across all races—were touched with genius. But, as my speculation just now about his divine bargain was meant to mark, there is no comparably shared understanding about the motivation, or say, rather, the ferocity of energy, that brought him to and served him in fashioning, and attacking, his version of existence. Many of us will have been beneficiaries of his encouragement. The capacity to praise pertinently is terribly rare and must have taken various emphases within Gus’s circles among those who benefited from it. In the rest of my few pages here, I want to say something more particular about how this was between Gus and me.

Several people have asked me about an unusually regular series of phone calls that engaged us for some time following Gus’s return to Albuquerque. (At the end of that Harvard fall term, just after the middle of December, Gus drove me in his truck to the Boston airport for my lonesome departure to Jerusalem to join a literary/philosophy group half way through its year of work, Cathleen and our two sons meant to follow some weeks later. So the series of phone calls probably began when I returned at the beginning of the following summer.) Gus and I had learned that we each began work early in the day, and though our different time zones prevented the simultaneity of the hour, we managed effectively to begin a number of our days with a call. My understanding of the air of emergency transmitted along most of the length of the States was that I had given the impression in my seminar—quite accurately, if unknowingly—that I was freshly perplexed by the public silence (where there was not active ugliness) that had mostly greeted my work, even some years after the publication of The Claim of Reason, sixteen years on and off in the writing. And while the freedom in achieving some distance from that book allowed me to follow my fascination with film and with American literature, I would, I suppose, unpredictably wonder out loud what the point of publication was in the face of such a discouraging reception. But of course I knew as soon as I might suggest the question that that was exactly the answer, namely to keep on providing occasions for happier, anyway for different, responses. I now feel that Gus, however else, took it as his responsibility to reassure me on this point, to respond in such a way that I would be made sensible through the very intensity of his perception of the value of what I was doing, and from that manage to contest any impulse to give it over.

It seemed clear to me in his conversation and its fields of reference that he took on this task quite systematically with others he valued. This should seem a familiar role friends can play, but could also seem, in its intensity, or sense of emergency, in Gus’s case to demand psychological interpretation—for example, speculation that what Gus craved was reassurance about his own ambitions, a voice from which to shore up his own recurrent loss of belief, or to receive authorization that he kept otherwise denying or despising (for example, refusing to take a graduate degree, and refusing otherwise to take on an institutionally proper teaching position), talking so incessantly and impressively and entertainingly that the alternative silence of writing might become engulfing—so perhaps assuring, in turn, the necessity for all but endless talking.

I share the feeling that an interpretation is called for by the apparent incongruence of the degree of passion driving his attestations, as well as by a further sense of imbalance in the disproportion between the encouragement Gus offered and one’s own sense of inadequacy to reciprocate with equal inventiveness. Listening together to recordings of jazz sometimes helped, if we were in his house, heaping shared joy on a third, incomparable, party, on a session, say, of Monk or Bird—but even then there was disproportion, since after my days in college as a practicing and studious musician I no longer kept up systematically with the extremity of evolutions in jazz, so here was a productive mode of mismatch, with Gus attending to my neglected education. But the weight of Gus’s acceptance could at any time make one feel an unpayable debt, sometimes to him, sometimes to the world for one’s having somehow somewhere uttered a rash promise.

Yet these stabs of interpretation, whatever interest, in certain moods, they may have, are surely too patently superficial to satisfy a genuine interest in this interesting man, to express a genuine affection for this affectionate man, whose effectiveness in taking interest in his discoveries was famous where he went. His extremities of response lie, I would rather say, precisely in the reach of his capacity for taking interest, for his serious concern about matters, frightening matters, that others appear to live with unalarmed. Others have wandered the estranged earth with the message Repent! Awake!, collecting laughter. Gus inspired laughter walking his familiar streets, kept awake, it strikes me, by the sense that the recognition of the seriousness of life, of the life of art and of philosophy, is receding, that attempts at originality are increasingly thought no longer to be hoped for, that the age has become accustomed to fraudulence, hence to rewarding either mockery or mere imitation.

Other writers and thinkers have of course over the past few centuries reported living with such impressions, and have written to prophecy this drift and to contest or to withstand it—one will see it, for example, in the cluster Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. Out of such a conviction Matthew Arnold would have drawn his once-famous appeal to the saving remnant in a fallen world—I suppose a more cultivated version of the recurrent tale of the unknown just men (thirty-six in Judaism, other numbers in other religions) in favor of whom God refrains from destroying the world. I have at times wished to understand Gus (knowing that I was and I am far from understanding him) not only to have remembered these tales but to have shaped them for himself in two not unreasonably concrete ways, one fairly familiar, the other extraordinary. The familiar way is his identifying the saving remnant with artists and philosophers in perhaps unprecedented guises (what I am calling familiar is the idea of art as taking the place of religion); the extraordinary way is his identifying himself as meant to recognize, and what is more, to select, further bearers of this assignment. (What could put greater distance between him and certain followers of Matthew Arnold who might have selected themselves for membership in the remnant? One of them, the Harvard professor Irving Babbit, around the time of the First World War, rebuked the charge that Arnold’s idea is priggish, claiming on the contrary that it was humble, thus convicting himself of the charge—humility, say self-forgetfulness, was held to be an essential, unknowable, trait of the thirty-six unknown.)

The logical consequence for Gus would then, obviously, have been as follows. Given that mortals, perhaps especially those with some visible gift, are subject to self-doubt and to spells of despair, it could happen that each of the selected (anyway those within his reach) might all despair at the same time and stop striving with their work. Hence God would at that time have no choice but to end things, or let us say He could at that time permit this to Himself. Enter the amazing, not to say devilishly angelic, Gus. It is up to him, wherever he recognizes salvational, redemptive, labor, to counteract the despair of those he recognizes.

Naturally—as my grateful if mildly mocking capitalizations suggest—the thought of influencing God might variously be allegorized into unproblematic acceptance. For example, instead of speaking of the radical forfeit of justice one might speak of the loss of any reason for serious work, or of the vanishing of meaning from human existence, or of the absence of shareable fresh objects of beauty and admiration. My dissatisfaction with such translations is that they prompt the surmise that Gus’s problem was merely psychological (more accurately, merely psychological), more or less attractively subjective, or say narcissistic, or neurotic.

At least two immediate facts of my life, or experience, close off such paths for me. Generally, so many of those I admire, and by no means only the dead among them, figure in the knowledge of the simultaneous proximity and distance of another world (that is, a world flush with this one, in moments quite indistinguishable from it), redeemed or sustained or promised by what they are doing now, and by what certain others seem to know. (If someone objects to the note of a transcendentalism in this perception, perhaps it will help to think of it rather as a refusal of immanentism.) Specifically, the figure posed by Gus did not mostly strike me as narcissistic or as merely subjective, however entirely he counted on his own experience and its matching or its tracing in others. (One image of his lack of self-consciousness, or perhaps of the consciousness of anyone unknown to him who would or could share in his experience, was fixed comically for me the time I arrived home, driving to the end of our quiet cul-de-sac in Brookline somewhat later than usual in the afternoon from a faculty meeting, to see Gus sitting on the stoop of the half flight of steps leading to our front door, in his usual layers of black and dark grey, with a cap, his beard striking me as more remarkable than I had ever seen it. It emerged that a neighbor across the court had requested a patrol car to question this stranger, who had sat for a while, then wandered away, then wandered back to sit some more. Gus let out some wonderful barks of laughter in narrating this encounter. It is fun to try imagining what engaging riff he had laid on the cop.)

Still, why risk unintelligibility by surmising that Gus had absorbed a myth more strictly than any usual idea of allegory is apt to capture? More positively, why isn’t my insistence here simply an effort to camouflage an affectation (of soul-saving mission) by covering it with an ampler affectation (of affection for the mission)? Now I have to go back to my recurrent sense of the extremity of Gus’s loves and interests in what certain others are making (and doubtless in the ways of certain others who make nothing, but these would be Gus’s secrets). The intensity did not habitually go unshared, as if mere eccentricity were a sensible concept for one’s knowledge of him. What went unshared was the tirelessness as well as the fervor of his grasp of these things. It is this quality of, let’s say, passion inhabited that, so far as I now can say, demands my appeal, in casting or cloaking him, to a beyond, a welcome future.

Some others I know who live with a comparable grip of things, of the dreadful and perpetual importance of things or events, recurrent or evanescent, express their knowledge of imminence in various forms of distraction or obsession or resignation. Kierkegaard advises that the knight of faith is apt to seem an exemplar of ordinariness, easily passed by. Something that makes this claim almost impossible to live with is that so radical a difference from what much of society takes to be of importance can fit one for unproductive unsociability. Here I intrude myself further by noting the significance, in my way of reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, of my insistent recurrence to Wittgenstein’s recognition that his investigations seem to destroy everything of importance (I #118), together with his accompanying declaration that philosophy leaves everything as it is (I #124). So which is it he does, threaten or reassure? I have seen my task in taking on Wittgenstein’s later work to demonstrate that these gestures are to be seen as reciprocal and inextricable. Many philosophers have told me—with varying degrees of impatience—that I fail to see that Wittgenstein reassures us (for example, against the threat of skepticism) by his appeal to ordinary language, to what he calls our language games. These philosophers seem to me in this guise to be descendants of Job’s comforters, exacerbating rather than calming anxieties, since Wittgenstein’s practices could not be clearer in their demonstration that impulses or intuitions or feints that a human being may entrust to words, hence to another (including himself as another), are all, permanently, liable to distrust, and worse. Nothing could be more voluptuously reassuring than to imagine Gus all at once becoming an incited samurai or a Latino tough in order to discomfit the force of such comforters.

Put things another way. The human condition, the human necessity to communicate, on taking thought, say philosophizing, brings itself to grief. Some find that noting the self-infliction of the grief, hence its pointlessness, ends it. Wittgenstein, instead, understands this grief as philosophy’s beginning, driving a wish to grasp what it is about the human condition—that is, the conditions (the modes of speaking and meaning together) in being human, evidently the basis of human unnaturalness atop the scale of living things—that makes it capable of, and inescapably exposed, subject, vulnerable, to these self-defeats. How, instead of becoming deranged or intellectually paralyzed, either by caring too much or too little about, for example, our knowledge and ignorance of suffering and of desire, do we learn the human gait of finitude? The question, taken relentlessly, is readily isolating. I sometimes try to imagine how Gus, with his extraordinary powers of presentation, might have imitated himself. Drawing a blank just here would seem a fair sign that his inimitability was itself an attestation of his irreducible originality.

I have thought that Gus sometimes perceived me as having survived my commitment to an academic life, and I think I know in part why he perceived things this way. I hope to heaven that what he meant is true, but in the end no one can prove it to you. Yet a friend can remind you, demonstrate to you, causing your undying gratitude, that success is not the only measure of success.

Stanley Cavell is emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard University, where he was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value. His books include Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971), The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (1979), Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981), Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (2003), and Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (2004).

Editor’s Preface

William Peterson

Who is Gus Blaisdell anyway?

In his Envoi at the end of this book, Ira Jaffe reports seeing that question scrawled on the men’s room door at an Albuquerque art-house movie theater in 1972. Ira had only just come to the University of New Mexico to start a new teaching post in film, but Gus Blaisdell was already a challenging and mysterious presence on the local cultural scene, a source of wonder and provocation. Gus was a dark star emitting an obscurely powerful influence from the gravitational field of his bookstore, the Living Batch. If you had any creative or critical inclinations, any curiosity about literature, philosophy, politics, or culture in general, or even if you just sought the sort of New Age esoterica that Gus grudgingly shelved under Gnarled Wisdom, it was impossible to escape the Batch’s orbital pull. Its eclectic and au courant stock, the authors’ readings and their vital satellite conversation, and the myriad small-press publishing efforts that Gus promoted were irresistible attractions.

But it was his intellect and talent, his wild humor and forceful personality that made Gus legendary. These had been evident almost from the moment of his arrival in New Mexico in 1964, when he first began to shake up the literary enclaves that convened in those days at Okie Joe’s Bar on Central Avenue and at the Thunderbird, the preferred watering hole of Robert Creeley and the poets of nearby Placitas. Besides his Stanford-trained background in philosophy and literature, Gus was also remarkably well connected, spinning a constantly expanding galaxy of friendships and associations among the literary and artistic lights on both coasts and beyond, a cosmopolitanism that locals saw as truly cosmic.

Poet, fiction writer, essayist, he was a philosopher and critic with a keen and versatile mind. But he was not easy to categorize. Raconteur and inspiring teacher, book purveyor and publisher, these were only some of the ways he made his way in the world, his few concessions to a standard curriculum vita. Gus was unique. Indeed he was—as even mathematicians and astrophysicists, modern descendants of the ancient night-watching diviners, might term it—a singularity.

Ira Jaffe, taking his term from the movies, says that Gus was a star and that, while Gus knew untold numbers of people, he is worthy of greater renown. Who is Gus Blaisdell? He is also the late too soon. He died suddenly of heart failure in September 2003, just four days before his sixty-eighth birthday. And so, as the singularity described by calculus and astronomy is elusive and said to hover critically somewhere between existence and nonexistence, known only by a kind of surrounding rumor, it is the purpose of this book to collect the evidence of Gus Blaisdell’s singular nature and perhaps secure for him a firmer place in the firmament of letters.

Introductory essays by philosopher Stanley Cavell and literary critic David Morris join Ira Jaffe’s poignant memoir to provide perspectives on the man by friends who knew him well. Glimpses of Gus’s vivid personality can be had from the many photographs gathered here by his daughter, Nicole Blaisdell Ivey, and her diligently researched and lovingly compiled chronology tracks the course of his life. For a capsule portrait, however, it would be hard to improve on one by poet and publisher (and one-time Living Batch employee), J. B. Bryan, in the Festschrift chapbook he prepared for Gus’s memorial celebration in 2005:

Gus lived as a man of discerning mind & precise locution, as well as blurted expletive. The oppositional was his blessing & curse. Sharp, jagged, uncannily quick-witted, he sought how to see, how to know, how to lay it down. Outrageous, often enraged, he liked the scat in scatological, he could insult, he could adore, a mimic ribald & hilarious, elegant steel-trap crankiness, photographic memory backed by a deep catalogue of reference wielded with fierce conviction. Within this shone profound appreciation for beauty (film, Monk, Matisse, Utamaro, photography, poetry, prose, mathematics, found objects, etc., etc.) & its precise articulation. His writings have hard-fought style with a content that requires slow, deliberate reading. Language & lingo, philosophy & logic argued toward revelation inside his own difficult critique.

This book collects a broad sampling of Gus Blaisdell’s writings. It consists mainly of critical and philosophical essays from the 1970s and 1980s, but the material extends from the early 1960s, when he was a young writer finding his footing, to 2003, the year he died. Although the writings take up issues that were current during that era of cultural discontent, they are timeless in their consideration of the kinds of philosophical issues raised by the media and the works of art that he addresses.

Among the topics are photography and motion pictures, painting and other art world preoccupations, philosophy, and the literary pursuits of reading and writing. In addition to the formal essays and experimental pieces, the book includes excerpts from correspondence, a few snatches of Gus’s poetry, and some samples of his imaginative fiction, including the completed parts of the ambitious and unfinished TLP Hotel project. The latter, initially called Radical Philosophical Reclamation & Wrecking, is a richly visualized narrative in which Gus transports the implications of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the Landsend of the West Coast and the wildly experimental endgame strategies of its 1970s art scene.

Forms of Discovery

Gus had a dissident frame of mind. Possessed of a philosopher’s instinct, the feeling that every commonly held assumption masks a more urgent question, he sought to reevaluate the commonplace. In his youth he was rebellious. Expelled from the San Diego public schools, he was entrusted to the brethren at St. Augustine’s, who disciplined his mind with a prep school education steeped in the classics. This immersion in Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas provided a foundation in philosophy and literature that he would enlarge at Stanford University and draw upon for the rest of his life. (To insert the Greek soldier-poet Archilochos into a discussion of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket would simply be second nature for him.) Swayed by the Augustinians’ learned Catholicism, Gus even considered becoming a priest. The concept of the dualistic soul, the full bodily dimension of spirit joined to flesh in Incarnation, would forever haunt him. And although he didn’t join the priesthood, he must have sensed a vocation. Eventually he quit the Church, but his writing, teaching, and conversation would be his way of administering to our collective souls.

During this formative period, Gus also haunted Lafayette Young’s offbeat bookstore. A friend of Henry Miller (he was the addressee of the Letter to Lafayette in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare), Young became a formative mentor for Gus, introducing the teenager to a world of literary possibility—poets Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Arthur Rimbaud, and Wallace Stevens, and writers as various as Herman Melville and Malcolm Lowry, Albert Camus and Djuna Barnes. Gus’s father, a naval officer, was almost entirely absent while he was growing up, and Lafe Young served as a significant surrogate of sorts, one of several spiritual father figures that Gus sought out. Others would include the poet and literary critic Yvor Winters at Stanford and publisher Alan Swallow. (A slightly different case was Gus’s later relationship with Stanley Cavell, which was more filial, like that toward an admired older brother that one looks up to and whose example one would like to follow, but not without a twinge of competitive rivalry.) Lafe’s son Geoff became a kind of younger brother. Gus had a gift for friendship and formed many filial relationships, particularly with fellow writers. Often these relationships found expression in soul-baring correspondence—as in the letters included here to Nicholas Brownrigg and Ross Feld, and in the extended birthday note to Robert Creeley. Gus’s letters to Geoff Young contain some of the most ribald, tormented, and wildly hilarious brainstorming that he ever put on paper.

Gus’s early ambition was to be a poet. It was after reading an essay by Yvor Winters on Wallace Stevens that Gus decided to enroll at Stanford in 1953 to study with him. Winters’ profound and precisely rendered poetry affected Gus deeply. But while Gus was taken with the power of Winters’ critical insights, he struggled for years with the dogmatic formalism that Winters espoused. Winters’ criteria for greatness in poetry formed the basis of a rigorous ontological approach that was labeled maverick by the poetry community at large (although it was in many ways comparable to the once widely influential theories of Clement Greenberg in the visual arts). Some years later, when Alan Swallow died while preparing Winters’ book Forms of Discovery for publication at his press in Denver in 1967, Gus stepped in to complete it. Writing jacket copy for the book, Gus explained that, "Style in Winters’ sense is not simply a way of gracefully combining words. It is the way a man lives, the method or art wherein he discovers to the best of his ability the real nature of the world and his place in it. It is in this sense that Forms of Discovery is a philosophical work."

In his memoirs, Larry McMurtry remembers Gus at Stanford, and he recalls how Winters’ fiercely proprietary attitude toward his poetry students kept them apart from the fiction acolytes in Wallace Stegner’s creative writing program (where McMurtry was enrolled). Nevertheless, Gus fraternized with the entire literary crowd. He met Ken Kesey on the school’s wrestling team and joined him as a volunteer in the psychology department’s CIA-backed research experiments with mind-altering drugs. Gus was also an item in the philosophy department, and when he returned to Stanford as a graduate student he had a teaching fellowship in philosophy, not literature. Working under Donald Davidson and Montgomery Furth, he applied his skills in math and logic to an examination of the epistemological works of Descartes and Hume, Leibniz and Spinoza, and most importantly, to Ludwig Wittgenstein.

But it was not long before Gus’s restless, incendiary streak flared up again. Torn between his literary ambitions and his philosophical quandaries, he self-destructed. When he walked away from his exams at Stanford, he blew off the credentials that would have provided the stability of an academic career, for which he was so uniquely gifted. Over the years he would be a lecturer at various institutions, or a visiting scholar or an adjunct professor, but never held a tenured position.

His intellect, impressive to all around him, could at times be intimidating—especially when exercised with that vein of aggression that he couldn’t always restrain. The brutally aggressive are always aggrieved and turned vengefully outward, Gus remarked (on two occasions—once about Norman Mailer and once about the artist Robert Smithson). Although Gus did his best to keep his own vengeful inner hounds muzzled, their snarl could flash unexpectedly across his teeth; and while he muffled his private grief (pondering it, like Mary, in his heart), the strain of sorrow had cut creases into his face. This lent his laughter the quality Baudelaire called Satanic (since neither animals nor angels laugh, but only humans—after the Fall). But their marks gave enhancement to the kindness and generosity that could also come over his face, an effect of benevolent sunshine emerging from clouds. Perhaps acquaintance with grief underlay not only his quest for understanding the human condition, but also his largeness of spirit and deep empathy for all fellow sufferers of incarnation.

In 1971, Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed hit Gus with the full force of revelation. Not only was Cavell addressing Gus’s deepest philosophical concerns (via Wittgenstein) and his favorite pastime (movies), but Cavell’s language approached poetry. After 1971, nearly everything that Gus wrote could be seen as a gloss on Cavell. (See Gus’s A Gloss Annexed for a pre-Cavellian discussion of gloss.) Subtitled Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Cavell’s book sought to define the medium of movies, eventually calling them automatic world projections. According to Cavell, movies provide a version of those psychological modes of projection and screening through which we deal with inner anxieties and attribute to others our own inner attitudes, an externalization of guilt and responsibility. Because their photographic basis allows us to view our world unseen, however, they increase the dangers of skepticism. Viewing unseen relieves us of responsibility to the world and to the kind of reciprocal acknowledgment that Wittgenstein insisted is required of us to be fully present within it. Gus found his private intuitions confirmed in Cavell’s book.

Books are worlds

Fundamentally, Gus was a man of the book. An avid and insatiable reader, as well as editor, publisher, and bookseller, he spent his life surrounded by books. At the time of his death he was preparing one of his own, sketching a compilation that formed the basis of the present volume. Real books he wrote, are rational beings in a form other than human. They are between us and angels. When Mallarmé said the world existed to be put into a book he saw the book as one of our most remarkable artifacts, the form of man’s argument with God’s nonexistence. These remarks come from Absorbing Inventories, an essay about Thomas Barrow’s photographs of personal libraries, in which Gus explores how the fortuitous assembly of books on a private bookshelf can be an oblique portrait, an exposure of the intimate passions and pursuits of the booklover’s mind. As companions of privacy, Gus declares, Books are worlds and doors of transport to themselves.

Gus’s extensive reading came with a cost, however. He constantly measured his own aspirations as a writer against what he encountered there. Do I believe I will one day burst on the scene? No. But I will one day, soon, produce a couple of good books, and that will be that, Gus confided to Geoff Young in a letter from December 1984. Except for his collaboration with Lewis Baltz on the monumental Park City in 1980, this hope was not to be realized. He never completed his Wittgenstein-inspired novel, TLP Hotel. Nor did he finish the vast undertaking called Loquats, which he had planned to assemble in the form of a nikki, a Japanese poetic diary. Loquats was to have incorporated early poems and short stories that dealt with his San Diego childhood, philosophical musings on the natural history of California, and an account of the maturation of his thought. But after years of fitful effort it remained incomplete. He did produce a couple of chapbooks of poetry and fiction, and he contributed brilliant essays to a number of photographic books—Joel-Peter Witkin’s Gods of Earth and Heaven, Baltz’s Candlestick Point.

For the most part, however, Gus’s writings were occasional, urged from him at the request of a friend. Published in ephemeral catalogues and journals, or given over to various alternative-press imprints, they were immediately absconded by a bandit obscurity and disappeared in the sands of time. Much of the writing collected here required excavation after Gus’s death—from the back shelves of libraries, from boxes of dusty paper files, and from Gus’s dormant computer hard drive. (Some rumored pieces never turned up. Film buffs will be disappointed that a much-anticipated analysis of High Noon remained elusive, as did a promised piece on Bergman’s Persona and Altman’s Three Women.) And if repetition occurs in the pieces reprinted here, it’s because Gus often recycled material, knowing that few readers were likely to have seen its earlier use.

In his letter to Geoff Young, Gus continued: Years ago Pearl [Placitas poet and thespian Bill Pearlman] said, ‘You burned up everything before it happened, Beats, hippies, etc.’ Gus agreed, but even as he drove himself onward he felt something was missing. I read them all with disappointment, thinking that in us there was something better to be expressed and that they had not done it, not Mailer, and none of the Beats, and none of the others. Did I drive myself past poetry, past fiction, ending with philosophy? I think something like that happened, and it is that arid, lofty, silent thing in the center of the orbit that I turn around, and around, my face toward it.… I want things to be damned good, the best they can be, and I am constantly disappointed.… It is a feeling: Can’t we do better? What have we lost? Something valuable has been forgotten, repressed, abused.

Darkness sur- / rounds us

I Know a Man

As I sd to my

friend, because I am

always talking,—John, I

sd which was not his

name, the darkness sur-

rounds us, what

can we do against

it, or else, shall we &

why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for

christ’s sake, look

out where yr going.

—Robert Creeley¹

Gus had a special fondness for this poem by his longtime friend Robert Creeley. He took a phrase from it as the name of one of his publishing imprints, drive he sd books. He also paid homage to Creeley’s poem at the close of the long essay Buried Silk Exhumed. There he presented an imaginary anecdote about two of his favorite jazz musicians, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, driving (presumably in a goddamn big car, top down, shades masking their eyes) along the California coast. It’s always night, Gus has Monk remark idly, gazing off to the Pacific’s shimmering afternoon horizon, because it’s only light when the sun’s up. To which he has Diz respond, "Monk, you are one deep cat."

Gus, too, was a deep cat. And while he loved jokes, lively conversation, and tall tales with an intellectual spin, there’s a darkness that shadows much of the writing in this book. It is the darkness of human finitude. While we hardly know what truly drives us, it’s a dread of darkness that jump-starts the helter-skelter getaway in Creeley’s poem, apprehension marked with that stammered line-break that voices how darkness sur- / rounds us. Darkness, in Creeley’s rendering, hovers over us in ominous supremacy and encloses us within its limiting sphere. It’s a nifty turn on Shakespeare’s "our little life is rounded with a sleep," which Gus clearly appreciated and redeployed as Monk’s perpetual night.

Like Creeley, Gus brought the instincts of a poet to his philosophical confrontations with darkness. In Original Face, an essay about a round, black, tondo-shaped painting by Allan Graham called Moon 2, Gus explores the darkness that precedes consciousness and is our constant companion. He quotes an ancient Zen koan, Before your mother and father were born, what was your original face?, to recall for us the darkness of unknowing out of which we have come, and to remind us that we must always look out from behind our own faces, remaining as dark to ourselves as the far side of the moon. Ultimately, self-knowledge, and the relationship of the self to the world, is the central issue addressed in these writings.

Become the kind of person on whom nothing is lost. Henry James’s advice to a young writer became a kind of mantra for Gus. It defined for him the task of the critic as well as the poet, and he felt it should be applied to everyday life. You have to observe closely and bring all that you know into your response. As a critic, Gus always assumed the role of an exemplary responder, showing what it’s like to attend to the work at hand. His essays frequently begin with a kind of preamble (before they take the mind for a walk) in which he tells of his difficulties in trying to come to terms with his topic, the struggle with the evolving hydra-headed implications that would occur to him as he grappled with it conceptually and tried to get his thoughts down on paper. Original Face is the most extraordinary response to a work of art that I have ever encountered. Gus simply presents himself to the work of art, confronts its singularity with his own, and engages with it as a fully embodied consciousness.

Self-knowledge, no matter how fragmentary and tenuous, Gus wrote in the 1960s, is the right kind of knowledge, the dialogue between ourselves and ourselves and between ourselves and the external world. No matter what the ostensible topic might be—movies, photographs, or the expressive qualities of various works of art, literature, or philosophy that he admired—Gus’s writing revolves around the quest for knowledge of the self and the search for understanding our human placement in the world.

There is a problem, however, at the very heart of the quest for self-knowledge. As Gus once observed about self-consciousness, It’s interesting that the self, as a prefix, keeps its hyphen, never quite combining with the consciousness it engenders; no, that engenders it. Consciousness of the self drops a shadow between the self and itself, just as it also intervenes between the self and the world. The black hole of solipsism is poised to suck us in, and the threat of skepticism, with its murky doubts and its despair of certainty (since our physical senses are notoriously untrustworthy and our knowledge of other minds always feels problematic), clouds our outlook on the world out there. Darkness sur-rounds us indeed.

How does one get out of the monstrous enclosures of the egocentric self? Gus asked, writing of his early interest in such philosophers as Descartes and Hume, who agonized over these issues. In a letter to Ross Feld he tells of his early romance with the mind/body dualism of Descartes: I was in search of the idea which engendered the body in the world, as was he [Descartes]. His idea was God, one in which content leads to existence. But that doesn’t work for me. God, for me, is a name for the fruitfulness of our ignorance, a thinking in the dark that pushes us on, and on: a fruitful ignorance.

So Gus’s God is associated with the fruits of our unknowing, a thinking in the dark that pushes us on. According to Wittgenstein, "Thought does not strike us as mysterious while we are thinking, but only when we say, as it were retrospectively: ‘How was that possible?’ How was it possible for thought to deal with the very object itself? We feel as if by means of it we had caught reality in our net" (Philosophical Investigations, I #428). But the truth is that neither reality nor the thinking self can be so easily caught. Our only net is language, and our words and our thoughts form substitutes, their referents eerily undetermined. In the actual use of expressions we make detours, we go by side-roads, says Wittgenstein (PI, I #426), We see the straight highway before us, but of course we cannot use it, because it is permanently closed. Nevertheless, Gus seems to say, since you are after all in the driver’s seat, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going! The line might just be the central message of Gus’s writings, which often, in their pursuit of grace and self-knowledge, take on the sound of admonishing sermons.

Rebus

The souled individual is both monad and abyss, always occult to the other, Gus declares in an essay titled Rebus. This essay takes its reader on a wild ride—Gus calls it a flight—as he ranges through his consciousness, surfs the possibilities of poetic association, and ultimately confronts the difficulty