Those who’ve read The Next Whole Earth Catalog may or may not have noticed at the bottom corner of every other page the excerpts from an unusual newsletter and gossip column called The Rising Sun Neighborhood Newsletter.

It’s the work of Anne Herbert, assistant editor of The CoEvolution Quarterly, which is put out by the same people who started the Whole Earth Catalog. The Newsletter she puts out every two weeks, and the best of it will soon be published in book form.

Thanks to Anne Herbert for permission to reprint these excerpts. Like Anne, they’re wonderfully human; like the rising sun, they speak to all of us.

For subscription information write The Rising Sun Neighborhood Newsletter, Box 428, Sausalito, Ca. 94965.

— Ed.

 

I was thinking that TV cameras are making us see only things kind of far away, and I was thinking that magazines are making us hear things only if they’ve been written down by someone we don’t know, and I was thinking that newspapers are making us value only people we haven’t met, so I started thinking we should start writing, drawing, painting, singing, shouting what we notice about the neighborhood right here to each other every day and maybe it will help us start to learn to treasure what we can also touch.

Elizabeth the bus driver says she knows how to make crazy ladies. When a woman starts to talk a little strange or even friendly but too aggressive, don’t answer her. She’ll keep talking, you keep not answering and she’s a crazy lady. Everyone in the bus agrees, you can feel them agreeing. Since she found this out, she has to answer everyone.

David Frost talked to the priest in India who goes around all day feeding people and helping very sick people and Frost asked him what was the worst thing about it and he said the worst thing about it was that it was so boring.

Did you ever notice that when newspapers, magazines and television decide to report on regular people, all they do is test them on whether they’ve been paying attention to newspapers, magazines and television? They go to some hog farmers in Indiana and quiz them to see if they know as much about the current media fad (Watergate, Korea, whatever) as the editorial writers for the New York Times and when they don’t, that finishes them. I’d like to see some farmer interviewing Harrison Salisbury about weather or saving a sick piglet or anything.

Whenever they ask I say, Date of Birth: 5/29/50, so the day before Memorial Day 1976 I’m turning 26 and remembering that every man my age had to go through one desert or another to reach this promised year of no more draft. They each lost something on the way: innocence, an arm, faith in whatever, freedom to flunk French, both legs, an entire country complete with relatives, a head that can hear backfires and not dive under the chair, friends, a certain natural honesty, the opportunity to cut college, the ability to do simple things like tie shoes and some just lost and aren’t going into 26 with the rest of us. I glide to twenty-six with all of the above and the life of my choice since you knew on 5/29/50 that they weren’t going to put my date of birth on any draft card or tombstone in Arlington at 3:01 p.m. when my vagina was born.

John the minister noticed that “by the way” is a phrase that is almost always a lie. People stop by the office and talk trivia for an hour, get up to leave, stop by the door and say, “By the way, Elaine and I are thinking of getting a divorce.”

Sometimes I wonder what Africans do with their time when they’re not getting massacred or getting their leaders changed. I mean, if you only hear about folks when they suffer disasters, death looks natural on them.

And now, in memory of Pope Paul, who from a central location in the largest palace in the world bestowed on millions of Latin American women and children more birth and more death, who was the inspiration behind the successful movement to give black women back their coat hangers, who assured fag baiters that God is on their side, who was, within the limits of his changing time and his changing church, as anti-sex, anti-love and anti-life as he could possibly be, let us all spit three times toward Rome and vow that we will not let TV obituaries by Hallmark Cards make us forget who our real enemies are.

“The way I see it you can treat your life like a fastball or a knuckleball, that’s the choice. Now, a fastball pitcher grabs tight on the ball, throws it as hard as he can, it spins through the air in a straight line, the batter knows where it’s heading and either he can hit it or he can’t. A knuckleball ball pitcher just lets the ball go, holds it with his middle two knuckles like a claw and lets it go, no spin and no straight line. It floats toward the batter and any little breeze can make it do something else, and there’s always a little breeze and the knuckleball surprises the catcher (who has to use a bigger glove and misses a lot anyway), the batter and the pitcher and the ball. Knuckleball pitchers can pitch a lot more years than fastball pitchers, but there aren’t very many of them.”

Don’t tell them how to do it, show them how to do it and don’t say a word. If you tell them, they’ll watch your lips move, if you show them they’ll want to do it themselves, and imitate you, said Maria Montessori, who thought she was talking about kids.

People will usually tell you pretty directly what question they want to be asked. Usually they ask you. Watch for the slightly off the wall, somewhat left fieldish question from friends — “Do you like your job? Do your parents get along? What do you want to do the rest of your life?” Point the question toward them and they may take a chance they’ve been waiting for to work something out in words.

Sylvia Weinstein’s poster for the Board of Education says, “It will be a great day when the schools have all the money they need and the Navy has to hold a bake sale to buy a ship.”

Every soap opera has one male and one female Catholic (never married to each other) so they can tie everyone else up by refusing to get divorced, she can refuse to get an abortion, he can refuse to let his girlfriend get an abortion and the plot can march on, Susan says.

“I guess this has been pretty hard on you.” “Yeah, I feel like someone has taken the corks out of my feet and I’m running out.”

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to pee in the streets and to steal bread.”

— Anatole France

A village is made of stories about itself.

“The most amazing thing happened. I’d been planning a trip to India next year to get something in the way of enlightenment, but we took a vacation in Mexico and it happened there.”

I told Susan he said that and she said, “It happens to Americans when they visit countries of very poor people.”

The creatures who live at the bottom of earth’s sky are much like the creatures who live at the bottom of earth’s sea — pale and oddly shaped with eyes bulging out of their heads to try and see earth’s other dim figures by what’s left of sunlight after it’s filtered through the miles of swirling slime above them, long appendages to drag them along the bottom and hold them up against the fierce gravity. They cannot imagine the world outside the odd substance, filled with invisible life, that they breathe through them at every moment. They can’t imagine that much light.

— Press release from the Moon Club

When they used to march soldiers to within a mile of bomb tests to watch and show soldiers could function under post bomb conditions, guys would hold their hands over their eyes and see every single one.

How I Became a Good Listener

The year after I graduated from high school, I didn’t go to college and I didn’t get a job. Naturally people kindly or cattily wondered what I was doing. Since all I was doing was hanging around my parents’ house feeling bad about myself, I didn’t want to talk about it. So I got good at thinking of leading questions and follow up questions to ask people what they were doing.

The best defense is a good offense and sometimes I would have whole conversations with people without them asking what my plans were. Coincidentally, I found out that most people have something interesting about them and not what you would have expected and if you listen long enough and ask enough questions, they’ll tell you.

Thinking the world should entertain you leads to boredom and sloth. Thinking you should entertain the world leads to bright clothes, odd graffiti and amazing grace in running for the bus.

I am not familiar with the theories of modern architecture but what it looks like from the outside is that architects noticed they were designing for the masses and decided the masses didn’t deserve to have any fun. Old architecture, Victorian, Gothic, you can play all kinds of games with — treasure hunt, hide and seek — because the builders left curlycues and knickknacks around for you to discover but about all you can say to the maker of a glass skyscraper is You win. (You don’t win fair but you win.)

I used to live right on the water and now I live right on a busy street. Some effects:

1. I am happy to see people moving like people outside my window. Seeing waves moving like waves was sometimes oppressive. (Maybe because, not being a sailor or a swimmer, I couldn’t join in.)

2. I leave the windows open unless it’s very cold because the air used to be alive.

3. I notice that distant, or windows-shut, traffic noise is not as different from distant, or windows-shut, water noise as good taste dictates it should be. (The water in waves goes round and round, the arms on pistons go round and round.) As Ngaio Marsh once asked, with almost no context at all, why is the spot of red in the forest so beautiful when we think it’s a flower and so horrible when we find it’s a candy wrapper?

David said he decided a long time ago not to be a revolutionary because no revolutionaries could destroy the bad things about this country as fast as this country will destroy itself because of its bad things.

Which do you think is more important to career development — not being able to type or not being able to cook? Which do you think is more important to revolution development — men typing or men cooking?

When Jesus visited his friends Mary and Martha, Martha got angry because Mary was listening to Jesus instead of helping in the kitchen. She said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone. Tell her then to help me.” And Jesus said, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about so many things, but only one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.” Which is fairly typical of men — not only is the cook supposed to make 247 variables reach a crescendo on the same table at the same moment — she’s supposed to be calm about it and take time to talk about great issues.

— Quotes from Luke 10:40 (King James)

It was really important to Freud that oceanic experience be really sexual. Oceanic experiences are characteristically had by children 7 to 9 who are walking around outside and suddenly feel that they are part of it all and it all is part of them and there are no lines between any of it. Time stops and the kid feels good. Freud said this was because children have an overdeveloped ego that feels it actually can encompass everything and also because they really want to have a little sex with someone but they repress that desire and it comes out as this false feeling of oneness.

It was really important to Freud that oceanic experience be really sexual because he didn’t want there to be an ocean. You could think there is an ocean and sex is one of the beaches and there are other beaches, but it wasn’t Freud’s kind of thought.

Gandhi said that the ally you must always seek is the part of your enemy that knows what is right.

As a mother and daughter walked into the gas chamber, the child was heard to say, “It’s dark, Mother, it’s so dark and I’ve been so good.”

— Told in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed by Philip Hallie

The Hasids thought that praying was a real activity, like sending in troops or building buildings, only realler, so they had a bitter debate about whether to pray for Napoleon when he was invading Russia. It was agreed that Napoleon was a horrible, godless destroyer. The question was whether one could ask, or demand, that God use him to destroy the Czar, who was even worse. After much argument, the two most important Hasidic rebs couldn’t agree, so one prayed for him and one prayed against him. It is said that if they had both prayed for him he would have won.

— This is the subject of a whole book by Martin Buber, called For the Sake of Heaven.

In some small Midwestern towns, almost any form of eccentricity is acceptable as long as it is neither political nor sexual.

When I was in elementary school, I knew we were the first generation raised with The Bomb and we were supposed to worry about it a lot, but I hardly thought about it. Even though we were sold identification dog tags when we were in the second grade and even though we went to the school basement twice a year and squatted down with our heads between our knees and our hands over our heads and even though there was at least a movie a month on TV about the last two to five people on earth, being bombed was not something I worried about, and I worried a lot. I worried about wearing the right clothes (the ones that would make me not shy) and whether people liked me and would I get my school work done in time and before I went to sleep I thought about this housefire I’d heard about. The fire had started inside the walls of the house and the family had gone about its business all day and in the night when they were sleeping the flames leaped out of the walls and burned them alive. It was an old house we lived in and you could hear it creaking all night long.

One time Al Capp was at a prayer breakfast Nixon had at the White House and he asked a butler for coffee with one lump of sugar and milk not cream. Two years later Al Capp was talking to Nixon in the Oval Office and when it was time for refreshments, Nixon said, “I know what you want, coffee with one lump of sugar and milk not cream.” Al Capp told his brother this story when his brother asked him if he thought Nixon knew what was going on during Watergate.

— Story told by E.J. Kahn in About The New Yorker and Me

I realized that about 80% of all ads say, “Lonely? Why not buy something in a cardboard box?”

What kind of people would have to be in what kind of trouble before you’d change your life to help them?

Paul Newman is color blind and can’t tell his eyes are blue.

When Chuck Yaeger became the first person to break the sound barrier, some people thought that breaking the sound barrier would cause the human body to disintegrate. Right before the first ever atomic bomb test, someone asked Fermi what he thought the odds were that the bomb would start a spontaneous nuclear reaction of the atmosphere that would destroy the world in less than a minute. He said, “Fifty-fifty.” Both men were strangely brave but Yaeger was brave for himself and Fermi was brave for everyone.

I completely see through people I hate; I can predict with amazing accuracy how people who get on my nerves are going to get on my nerves again. People I like I pretty much understand but they surprise me sometimes; people I love are almost wholly mysterious. It’s probably a matter of how much data you collect. Physics was pretty sure of itself there in the middle with balls striking each other and planets rotating and causes effecting, but now that they know about all of these little particles, they know that all of these little particles are being random all the time, doing what they want who knows why, though balls and planets are still predictable. I know why my truelove quit his last job and why he took his current one, and I was sure he was going to do both before he was, but I can’t figure out why he smiled that way, in that place, about that sentence and the more I think about it, the stranger it is.

Lord Greystoke announced his discovery that black holes are the elephant graveyard — the elephants go off to this whirlpool at the source of the Nile and are whooshed into a black hole in space (different black holes for different elephants) and are recycled and their tusks become stars and their hides become cloudy days and their souls become planets which explains why planets seem to be moving really slow even though they’re moving really fast because that’s how elephants move. Mostly Greystoke was back to look for Jane, found out that she had been able to get National Geographic to front the money for her to hang out with chimps, something he’d never thought of, but now she couldn’t because her station had to be manned by blacks because of political pressures, which he didn’t understand because of how he’d always been real nice to the natives. When he found out she was supporting efforts to teach chimps human sign language he was really p.o.’ed. — “That’s like teaching Shakespeare to talk like a sociology professor — you and me knew what they were saying all the time, didn’t we, Janie?” But she talks different now too, she knows how to get grants, and he was last seen heading for the source of the Nile, naked as an elephant.

In his prepared statement, he had said, “You guys keep shooting the elephants instead of letting them go off to die, you gonna be further up shit crik than you ever dreamed possible. Elephants do a lot after they leave here, not just being stars, like anything good that happens against the odds, half the time it’s an elephant at work.* Like you think there ain’t been a nuclear war because Brezhnev and Nixon were nice guys, cause Jerry Ford was smart maybe? There’s two elephants out in Andromeda Galaxy (M31/21 and 43 on your star map) been working their asses off to keep the missiles in their silos but they’ve been dead a long time and they’re tired. They need help and shooting bunches of elephants to save the corn crop or resell them in pieces in the back of The New Yorker sure as hell ain’t the way they’re gonna help so watch out is about all I got to say, and I don’t expect you to listen.”

*The rest of the time it’s chipmunks or good intentions.

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.

Jonathan says it’s bad luck to look behind the refrigerator because it means you’ll clean there.

When Art and a friend of his used to spend hours discussing their friends and how they acted and why they acted the way they did, they called it “talking about people’s shadows,” to remind themselves they really didn’t know.

One time a friend of Kathleen’s got tired of taking all that acid without learning the truth, so he decided it was time to take the trip. He went into the back bedroom, closed the door, turned off the lights — no visual or audio stimulus. He saw himself sitting in front of a door. He got up and opened that door and there was a hall with a door at the end and he opened that door and kept on like that opening doors and getting, he could tell, closer and closer till he finally reached the door that he could just tell was the door with the answer and as he reached to open it the door knob in the real bedroom he was in started to turn and his roommate walked in and said, “What’s happening?”

He decided he wasn’t supposed to know the truth.

Her problem was she was translucent (more sometimes than others, more noticeable to herself than others) and when, for example, she held her hand up to shield her eyes from the sun and the sun shone through a little, she found it to be an inconvenience as well as a star in the middle of her hand. Some things passing through left traces, such as the nearly new moon on the sticking out bone of her left wrist months after she’d pointed at it and the cow’s nose she’d petted one summer’s afternoon and glimpsed faintly on the back of her hand on yearly anniversaries of whatever day it was. There was also an owl she’d stared at for hours one moonlit night staring out of the back of her head but it was only seen by the guy who cut her hair who took it as a sign to take less drugs and move to Oregon (but he was probably going to move to Oregon anyway) and a couple of lovers (who were probably going to stop being lovers anyway). Everyone’s skin looked so cold and clammy through hers, except on some sunny beaches, that she tended to send all lovers away until sooner or later she met someone opalescent which was better — faint rainbows showing through her knuckles made touching more fun — but also disconcerting because when their whole bodies touched at the same time it turned out they matched, every other molecule, and they fell right through each other. “Maybe if I wore pantyhose and sold real estate these things wouldn’t happen to me,” she thought, but it was too late for that, and she and her lover learned to do controlled falls and stop in the middle of each other to let some molecules change bodies if they were bored, and pretty soon both of them were both translucent and opalescent and found each other’s bodies about the best thing to look at the world through — hidden spectrums found, beauty of shapes revealed through simplification, the funny fuzzy texture of human skin over it all. They still used their naked eyes some for old times sake and contrast but one time when they were watching the sunset through each other they disappeared.

Multiple choices:

1. Individual human beings think of, create, originate ideas.

2. Ideas occur. Sometimes they occur where one person’s mind is, sometimes they happen in several minds at once.

3. Ideas emerge from conversation. It can be a conversation between different parts of one person, one person and the world, several people in the same room, several people on the same planet sensing each other, between different parts of the world and maybe an individual transcribes the conversation — what does the civil rights movement say to bored housewives, what do roses say to glass, what did Genghis Khan say to the Transamerica Pyramid? Were you there when the Chiffons stole My Sweet Lord?

4. Ideas emerge from silence. The reason you think of things right before you go to sleep is that you’ve finally shutup so the idea that’s been knocking at your head all day can come in.

5. “Sometimes I see the image whole in my head before I start and sometimes it’s time to start something new and I start drawing on some paper and something happens.” (Ideas are answers to questions you ask and leave silence after.)

6. Elias Howe who invented the sewing machine and to whom Help is dedicated got really stuck part way through inventing the sewing machine, because the needle had a hole in the top at the dull end because needles always had the hole in the top at the dull end but the machine wouldn’t sew with it that way and one night he dreamt about a bunch of Africans running around with spears and all the spears had a hole right in the tip and Howe woke up and knew that putting the hole in the pointed end of the needle would make the sewing machine work and it did.

7. “Regard everything as an experiment.” Corita Kent’s 6th law of teaching and learning. (Ideas emerge from relaxation but on the other hand some of us can’t relax until we’ve put it off three months past the last minute and decided it will prove our basic worth or lack of and then by putting it off we’ve proved lack of and then given up and relaxed and let the idea happen, but I suppose one could relax at the beginning.)

8. “I waited on the Lord; he took his own sweet time.”

9. Ideas rise from messy desks and messy minds where objects and concepts and memories that would not meet in an ordered universe bump into each other and start new and different disordered universes and boy is that self righteous coming from me.

10. “I did stuff over and over again for a while but then I found out I could get a lot of the same effect by letting time pass — on Monday whether or not I wrote 12 drafts in between.” So much of the process is subterranial, subcranial anyway that how much you suffer as the idea happens and grows may be related to how much you like to suffer rather than to helping the idea. Some of the 99% perspiration that genius is supposed to be made of may be attributed to a muscular inability to be patient. Gertrude Stein said, “It’s hard to be a genius, you have to sit and not think so much.”

11. Art and I had this conversation in which the idea was thought of or occurred that ideas need to live in neighborhoods close together so they can bump into other ideas and make new ideas and not in the suburbs with lawns in between them.

12. The army guys and the political guys in Germany successfully kept the physicists who were trying to build an A bomb from talking to each other. The army guys in the United States tried to keep the nuclear physicists from talking to each other but they didn’t succeed.

13. Sometimes you have to build the altar in order that the fire from heaven may come down someplace near us. The way to catch a unicorn is to sit very still and to have not worn yourself out doing other things. Catching unicorns has to be it for you, whether you catch one or not. You’ll have to like sitting as much as you like catching since you’ll be spending so much more time at it.

— Many of the choices were thought of or occurred in conversations Kathleen and I have had about thinking things and having things think of you.

“I think people with certain kinds of parents can recognize each other by the fake limp. ‘Sorry I exist, Dad, but I’ll seem incompetent to make up for it.’ ”

— “You’re wonderful, Evelyn.”

— “No, I’m not, but I would be if I had some chocolate.”

It’s all very well, sci fi fans, to realize the evil you must fight, are trying to fight, is embodied in your image in the mirror, someone with your very name, your doppelganger walking down the street toward you, your long lost brother sister father mother, but the real life stinger is finding out that the good you must embrace is walking around living in someone who has the other kind of earlobes, feels the other way about anchovies, wakes up with the other amount of energy in the morning, and will probably never read your favorite book.

Stephanie was saying one reason condoms don’t work is one size doesn’t fit all — sometimes they’re too large and they fall off and stuff like that, so they should actually be available in sizes like large, extra large and enormous — even as with olives, there should be no small sizes — then we started thinking of various names for the sizes such as delicious, delightful and incredible; gosh, o my god and I don’t believe it; huge, gigantic and beyond human imagining — and then a male human being walked into the room and Stephanie blushed and quickly went back to her office to write about birth control for The Next Whole Earth Catalog.

There was a guy I grew up knowing and I thought his main handicap was having a club foot and then years later I found out his main handicap was that he was a homosexual in an isolated small town where everyone thought homosexuality didn’t exist and was horrible if it did and he agreed. Although I still don’t know if that was his main handicap — maybe he saw everything in four dimensions all the time without drugs or anyone to talk about it, or maybe he saw seven other colors than anyone else and his favorite made his eyes hurt almost, but not quite, unbearably or maybe he couldn’t see cars but could only hear them so spent a lot of time being scared but he wasn’t sure what of.

We were looking at a book of old magazine ads and noticing how silly they were and how much they were like the same stuff today and I realized that about 80% of all ads say, “Lonely? Why not buy something in a cardboard box?”

“A journey of a single step begins with a thousand miles.”

David often sketches people on buses and other kinds of public places and gives them the sketches. Poor people, he’s noticed, expect to pay for the sketch and rich people expect to get it free.

“Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.”

— Freud

“An elderly man that I talked to said that he was happiest in his garden these days. He said, when you’re 84 and your only vocation is just being alive, you get a real affinity for flowers and vegetables.”

— Patricia

When we get there we’ll be able to look at the sun all day and never squint. The sun will be no dimmer but we’ll be shining back.

Compare and contrast People and Man: The History of Man, The History of People. Man’s Search for Meaning. People’s Search for Meaning. Man Discovers the Wheel. People Discover the Wheel. The trouble with man is not just that he’s a man but that there’s only one of him. One tall, jut-jawed, clear-eyed, well-hung male striding purposefully through the ages toward some goal both logical and grand. The History of People sounds casual and messy and it was.

© Copyright The CoEvolution Quarterly 1980