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by Lance Pierce
Like his character Ishmael, Daniel Quinn possesses and
is possessed by a weary wisdom, and he finds himself unwittingly at the center of a
cultural revolution of his own device. Teacher, speaker, and now reluctant prophet, he
spends most of his free time answering questions, setting the record straight, and
fulfilling his role as the progenitor of a new era...
We were coming into a little bit of turbulence. It
wasn’t enough to be unsettling, but it was there, small sudden shifts and drops that
reminded me of our mercy at the hands of nature. A fine spray of water created trails
across my window - held in situ by the massive air currents outside - horizontal
rivers, it seemed to me, models in miniature of great wide tributaries rushing toward an
unknown destiny. It reminded me of something Daniel Quinn wrote about rivers of vision.
I leaned forward suddenly and looked out the window; I
thought I might have seen something...a rainbow. Not just any rainbow, mind you, but a
certain, special kind. One for which I’d been looking all my life.
This odd search began when I was a small child. No bikes
or balls for me; I loved to read puzzle books, books on logic problems, mind-teasers, and
conundrums. One in particular I still remember: Reader’s Digest’s Tests and
Teasers, a paperback full of trivia and entertainments. What do the letters in ANZAC
stand for? Why, the Australia-New Zealand Army Corps, of course. Can you rearrange the
letters in NEW DOOR to make one word? Yes: ONE WORD.
And this question: Can the rainbow ever be seen as a
complete circle?
As it turns out, the answer is yes, but only from aircraft
and only under certain weather conditions. In the ensuing 25 years, I’ve gazed from
every airplane window (and it feels as if I’ve been in hundreds of planes) in hopes
of seeing this phenomenon. With each disappointment, I recline in my seat with a heavy
sigh and turn back to my magazine, Dell Pencil Puzzles and Pastimes (some habits
never die), and my small bag of honey roasted nuts, compliments of my frazzled but
gracious attendants.
I was privileged to see a double rainbow once (one inside
the other), some time ago as I walked from my car, my back to the sun. It was an
intriguing and oddly wonderful sight. My heart, though, still longed for the one thing
that had been denied me, and now, as always, my nose pressed to the glass, I saw nothing
but the miles of white cotton clouds beneath me, rich with texture and shrouded in mist.
As I invariably had before, I sighed as I relaxed back into my seat, but this time there
were no puzzles, no games, no recreations to divert me. I still had work to do.
I looked down at the notes on which I was laboring, trying
to make certain I had everything in mind when I arrived. I was a little nervous, a little
concerned. You see, I was going to Austin to meet Daniel Quinn, to ask him about Ishmael,
The Story of B, and the fate of our species.
"The Story of B - a dangerous book?" I
had written at the bottom. This was something I wanted to ask him about. In prepublication
the book was already becoming controversial. Quinn was kind enough to provide me a copy
some weeks before, and I read it in a day. It was the backbone of Ishmael dressed
as one man’s search for the Truth disguised as a murder mystery presented as a spy
novel. I found it intriguing, captivating, and darkly uncompromising. Dangerous? Now, that’s
intriguing!
I worked on my notes some more, adding items, rearranging
them, deleting some - I’m never sure if I’m actually sufficiently prepared for
anything I guess - and before I knew it, the plane was touching down.
I'd been corresponding with Quinn for weeks by electronic
mail, forcing a regular stream of conversation, feeling him out, getting to know him and
his ideas. "When at last publication of Ishmael was assured, back in
1991," he wrote in an early letter, "I honestly (and, my goodness, how naively!)
thought this episode of my life was finished. The ideas I’d set out to deliver had
been delivered — with immense difficulty, it’s true, but at least the job was
done and I could now go on to other things. If it didn’t so nearly make me weep, it
would make me laugh to think how far off the mark I was!"
Ishmael, Quinn found, was bigger than he was, and
now had a life of its own - a life that swirled around him and enveloped him - and at the
same time was him. Readers constantly write to ask for further clarification on
this point or that, to criticize his points, or to thank him for illuminating a concern
that had held them in limbo all their lives. It has become an awesome responsibility, but
one that Quinn does not shirk nor complain about - he accepts it willingly, knowing that
his life has been given great importance by the power of his ideas. Rather than it being
the end of a long quest, Ishmael was the beginning of the journey that Quinn
inwardly always knew, but rarely suspected, he would someday be on.
Stepping out of the corridor into the terminal area, I
spied him instantly, recognizing him from his publicity stills. They always seemed to
convey a man of thought, reflection, and kind consideration, and I saw immediately that
this was not a fluke; the photographer had captured the essence of Quinn.
He looked at me through his glasses with half a smile and
we exchanged the greetings of those who are waiting to see what the day will bring. Quinn
turned out to be a very soft-spoken man, despite the force behind some of his
communiqués, and he moved with slow, casual, and somewhat absent-minded deliberation as
we headed for the exit where his car awaited.
Rennie, his wife, was minding the car when we arrived. She
was slender and moved with feminine ease as she climbed into the back seat and settled in.
Things were immediately apparent in her as well; beneath her gracious exterior was a
sharply efficient mind, one that could help manage the affairs of life after Ishmael,
tracking the five-thousand-and-still-coming letters they’ve received from people
around the world, helping to keep up with all the happenings everywhere related to
Daniel’s work.
"Some news came down the pike," Quinn said
before I’d even buckled in. "Ishmael, it seems, is going to be a
movie."
"That’s great!" I said, truly impressed.
"No," he replied. "Not great. As it turns
out, Disney has opted it, and rather than doing a Lion King treatment or some such -
thanks for small favors - they have cast John Travolta as an anthropologist who is
mistakenly arrested for poaching, and while he is in prison, he tells the stories of the
Leavers and Takers to a prison psychologist."
I was silent for a long moment. "Where’s the
teacher? Where’s Ishmael?" I asked.
"Exactly. I find it unfathomable that they could, for
some odd reason that I will never understand or probably even be aware of, want to do a
movie that is so counter to what Ishmael is. I can’t even begin to imagine
what can be going through their heads."
"I don’t suppose that the writer - you - has any
control or influence whatsoever."
Quinn shook his head. "Not in that regard. However, I
will fight it. I think that there are enough people who will agree with me...and with the
Internet we can reach thousands more. Disney probably isn’t worried about me in the
least, but I believe I have the resources and finances to put up a worthy and not
inconsiderable amount of resistance."
Ishmael, it seems, is very important to Quinn. The
ideas and teachings within are not merely a book he enjoyed writing or a project he
completed before its deadline. They are the result of decades of consideration and
reflection, years of searching for answers to questions which have long been thought to
have none. They are as essential to his existence as any man’s religion. Understand
one and you know the other.
The Quinn residence is a direct reflection of him and
Rennie. Open, expansive, and comfortable, it wraps itself around you the moment you walk
in the door. It is, at its bottom line, the perfect writer’s haven. "Rennie and
I have always wanted to live in a museum," he said as he led me through various
rooms. "I think we’ve come reasonably close." In the living room, he and
Rennie showed me a death cart constructed by a Leaver people formerly located in what is
now New Mexico. In the seat of the cart, le Morte himself, sitting straight and
tall, but looking emaciated and plague-ridden. You knew, though, that the hands are strong
and that once the grip was felt, he would never let go.
Placed elsewhere around the house were artifacts, fossils,
talismans, and statues from various cultures, all rich with age and history, all embodying
the very essences of peoples long gone. On the fireplace hearth, Quinn displayed a chess
set created by an Ishmael fan, the opposing armies artfully comprised of Leavers
and Takers.
Also carefully placed in each room were works of art by
Quinn himself, collages in 3-D, shadow boxes in the extreme. One was a combination of
antique doll, soap can, and plastic lizards, and it burst forth from a bathroom wall.
Another, a conglomeration of items that could have come from a garage sale on the wrong
side of town, blended, shaped, and fashioned to form a unique and possibly disturbing
assembly that defies definition.
"What about these?" I asked, pointing to large
emotional paintings, deeply rich in color and depth. They were abstracts that swirled and
pulsed. I could almost sense a current on the canvas. "Oh, I did those, quite some
time ago," said Quinn.
"Renaissance Man?" I asked him.
"Sorry," he said. "Can’t carry a
tune."
I turned to find Quinn sitting on a sofa beneath one of
his works, looking at me with mild amusement.
"What do you think?" I asked.
"About what?"
"About the interview?"
He shrugged a little. "Let’s do it."
You wrote a book called Providence,
in which you detailed events in your life that led up to Ishmael.
Yes.
And in Providence
you related a dream you had as a very young child, I think around the age of six, where
you stood at the boundary between the world you know and the rim of a vast forest where
the rest of the community of life lives. It was, I think, a dream of unusual depth for a
child of six. Was this the start of Ishmael?
Well, I would say that my journey started with a
dream. I wouldn’t say the book started there, but my personal adventure in life, yes,
very much so. In trying to make my life understandable to people and even to myself, I
tried to organize it, and in looking at it from that point of view, what I saw was that
here at this point was where I wrote Ishmael and in looking further back and back
and back and back - and I didn’t think of it that way until I wrote Providence
- but in asking where did this all start, it came to that dream.
You also wrote about the
experience at the Garden of Gethsemani, when you were in training at a monastery, where
you saw firsthand the "fire of the world;" everything appeared vibrant and alive
and electrified to you. And you searched for years after that to find out what it could
possibly have meant.
Yeah. Because it was not in the context of Christian
mythology.
It must have been very
disturbing for you.
I didn’t think of it so much as disturbing as just
without context. So I spent subsequent years searching for one - not constantly, but
always coming back to it and saying, "What does this mean?" I didn’t
discover a context until after several years. I had to, in effect, write a theology that
incorporated it.
What a challenge!
(laughs) I didn’t know that I was doing that
at the time I was doing it. During those times I was writing the books that eventually
became Ishmael, I wasn’t thinking in terms of writing a theology at all. I was
searching for a theology, and I was trying to get a handle on what went wrong and what was
going on.
I suppose a measure of my success is how so many people
write to me and say that they have been struggling with this stuff, this same thing, for
years or all their life, and that they’re very grateful that I managed to find a way
to articulate it. Well, I tried many different ways to articulate it. In Ishmael I
finally came up with the model of "the story." We talked about the Taker story,
which is that "The world was created for man to conquer and rule, man was made to
conquer and rule the world, and that the reason it hasn’t worked out is that man is
flawed."
But actually, two stories have been enacted on this
planet by mankind. One is the story of the Leavers which began about three millions years
ago. Then we Takers came along, about ten thousand years ago, and we adopted a different
story. Because of our story, we believe that the world belongs to us, was made for us,
everything in the planet and on the planet belongs to us, it is our property, we can do
anything we want to it, and God will make it right.
This mythology began to be shattered about 45 years ago
when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. This was the first time that anyone had
come forward and said, "You know, you can’t drench the world in DDT and expect
it to be okay." Before that, the man who invented DDT won the Nobel Prize for this
wonderful piece of work! (laughs) He almost destroyed the world, practically
toppled the ecosystem! And for the first time, someone said, "There is a limit to
what we can do to please ourselves on this planet."
But we wanted to get rid of those fucking insects! And
this is the best way to do it. "Sure it goes into the water. What’s the problem?
Sure it goes into the soil. What’s the problem? So the birds eat it. Who cares?"
This attitude of course still survives. You hear it on talk shows - Rush Limbaugh still
promotes this - and people have not recovered.
Our story also says we are headed toward a glorious future
and it just keeps getting better and better and better and better and better and better
and better. And this seems to be so, because we look back 500 years ago and say, "Oh,
God, who would want to live back in 1400? Oh, man, that was really rotten." But it
got better in 1450, it got better in 1500, and so on, and it will just keep on getting
better and better and better.
But in the last 50 years, people have seen it’s not
getting better. Our toys are getting better and better; no question about that. But
it’s impossible for people to continue to think things are getting better and better,
because they’re not. Every year crime increases, every year suicide increases, every
year drug addiction increases...you cannot look at this stuff anymore and say everything
is getting "better and better and better." It’s just not happening. So
people are in a state of cultural collapse. They question, because nothing make sense to
them anymore.
In The Story of B, I talk about this in some
detail. I talk about the fact that in any culture that is smashed to pieces you will see
this happen. The old customs and laws come into disrepute. The elders can no longer
explain things to the satisfaction of the young, and the kids take up lawlessness,
drunkenness, crime, and become suicidal and depressed. You can see this in a Navajo
reservation, for example. But now we’re seeing the same thing happen in our cities.
Visible symptoms of a
culture under stress?
Highly visible. You would not have seen this 100 years
ago. Something has happened here, and what has happened is that people have stopped
believing in the story of our culture. And that’s what I had to get at in Ishmael.
That’s what I wrote Ishmael to do, to bring out this story so people could
see it.
Joseph Campbell was noted for saying that the difference
between us and peoples in the past is that we have no mythology. People liken my work to
his, but the fact is I’m contradicting him, because I’m saying he was looking in
the wrong place for our mythology. He wasn’t listening to what is said on television,
what is said in the comic books and the cartoons on Saturday morning. He wasn’t
looking at the advertising that comes out, wasn’t listening to what the people were
saying in the pulpit or reading what they were printing in textbooks. There you find that
we definitely have a mythology that is very distinctive, very much our own, that says,
"the world was made for us and we can do whatever we please with it."
Now, this is not a fact, but many people regard this as
just simply a fact. But it’s obviously mythology. It couldn’t possibly be
anything but mythology, unless someone would come up and show me a deed signed by God
giving us this planet. But this is what people of our culture believe. So what I did was
to bring it forth and put it into words. We are newcomers on this planet. We can hardly
claim that it belongs to us. The living community was here 3 billion years before we came
along. So, far from it belonging to us, we are interlopers. That is the basic message of Ishmael.
In Providence you
said that Ishmael is a book of mystery, even to you.
I did? Did I say that?
Yes, you did. And I’m
kind of curious as to why it’s mysterious, even to you?
(Thinks for a long time. Gets up, fixes himself another
refreshment. Is gone for a long time. Comes back. Sits down. Thinks some more.) A
mystery is something that you cannot finish understanding. So you can go on and on and on,
and you never completely exhaust it. That’s mystery. You never get to the point where
you say, "Okay, I’m finished with that." I would say that what I’m
exploring is a mystery in that I don’t think it will ever be completely understood. I
think that anyone who reads The Story of B will get a sense of someone who is
struggling with a mystery.
go to page 3
(part two of interview)
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