F. SCOTT FITZGERALD CAMPFIRE CHAT
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cvii.
I guess that this is how it feels, my girl,
Haunted by poets and prophets of yore,
We see the wind where they see but the whirl,
They hear the story while we live the lore.
I guess that this is how it sounds, my friend,
The applause of the summer's rustling leaves,
for the living performers who defend,
by action the ideals that God believes,
I guess this is how it's going to be,
With bandannas, paper, pen, and a dream,
For those born yearning for the open sea,
Where gold always sinks, leaving stars to gleam.
So this is how it is, just three tall masts,
He who signs aboard shall be he who lasts.
AS THE SUMMER DOLDRUMS RELENT
AND WE PREPARE FOR THE WORLD'S GREATEST ADVENTURE
by Drake Red Avenger RaftAgrhrgrrhrgrh! Ahoy there me merry maties! August is barely upon us, yet even now I sense a rising hint of the inevitable NNW wind! These cultural doldrums shall not last, mates. This ennui, boredom, and atrophying of the soul, this indifference towards the decaying family and the decline of traditional ideals, this silent slumbering of the righteous while the Western Heritage is allowed to dissipate. This exaltation of the material over the spiritual, and the nihilistic over the Permanent Things shall not endure, for be it known that money can never be worth more than meaning itself. This scuttling of religious ideals, this ruthless profiteering by the marketers of the crass, this dumbing down of America's culture so as to make it accessible to markets about the world, where cheesy music is adored, Madonna reigns, and the printed word is ignored. This country club conservatism, this worship of intellectual indifference, this idolization of the bureaucratic ability to remain smug, sincere, and gallant while speaking lies; this tutelage in the postmodern art of harboring no truths in one's soul, while being governed by appetite alone, with every atom and action of one's body motivated not by what is right nor true, but by what pays better and by what gains glory in the postmodern media's inverted context. While this appeals to barbarians and the imperceptive, to the dull, arrogant, and base, to the airheads, the vindictive, and the cowardly, the Good Ship's crew finds it boring. Nay, it does not appeal to me, nor to the moral majority of the United States of America, and thus we have shoved off, in search of more permanent treasures.This slackerdom, this publication and reviewing of hordes of inconsequential books by hordes of inconsequential liberal critics while Shakespeare is silently removed from the classrooms-- these things shall come to pass. This concerted attempt to bore my generation to death with Mallapaloozas, with a never-ending array of cloned bands and boomer-approved corporate grunge, with vast neon websites instituted for the sole purpose of losing venture capital garnered by technology, not by poetry. But the WWW is no longer a purely technological realm. Each day it belongs more to the prophets and poets, as the content, rather than the color, differentiates the websites. This exaltation of the social sciences over the mystical, divine beauty of the soul, and this cowering before liberal administrators, editors, producers, agents, directors, professors, and corporations-- surely the bold shall tire of this servitude. This censorship of the noble arts by the vast proliferation and relentless promotion of the mediocre polemical efforts of vindictive politicians, while the Book of all Books remains unread, unrequired, and unheralded, but to be castigated, impugned, deconstructed, and treated as no more than a sailor's superstition. Aye aye then-- 'tis me superstition, and it is the priceless private property that I wish to pass on to me children, along with faith, honesty, fidelity, respect, sobriety, and that which results from these ideals-- romance. Thomas Jefferson once envisioned that the separation of church and state would prevent the corruption of religion by the state. Never did he advocate the elimination of religion by the state-- that is the passion of the contemporary liberal judiciary and academy, who have commandeered the contemporary institutions so as to steer them in the exact opposite direction from that which they were originally commissioned for. And is not elimination the final form of corruption? Woe to those who would ban the Law of all Laws, the Ten Commandments, from a courtroom. By whose Authority do these irreverent, pompous bureaucrats act? Who has proclaimed the secular humanists to be superior to the prophets of antiquity? Since when does a law degree render one superior to God? Under whose orders did these mutineers cast the moral compass overboard? And now what do they expect to navigate society's ship by in this postmodern fog? Nietzsche, or President Shapiro's intellectual indifference? Not content with sailing any further in that meandering direction, we've built a ship of our own.
We're making preparations for September, whence we are forecasting a sea change in the cultural climate. We've been hiding out and laying low here in Ocracoke, where The Jolly Roger's in dry dock. We've been fortifying her hulls with the wisdom of the Greats, reading Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, and staying up late, purusing Plato's Republic, and wheeling the entire Western Canon aboard The Good Ship. This academic year we expect to engage in battles that dwarf our previous naval campaigns in fire and fury. We are under orders from the Captain of all Captains, and our orders are to stick by our guns and maintain our course, come hell or high water.After we flayed a few fringe feminists who made the mistake of engaging the Roger in battle out upon the level playing field of the wide open ocean, the military strategy of the wisened liberal elite has been to avoid the world's largest literary frigate as best they can, while continuing to utilize our tax dollars to support their inferior art, their insipid scholarship, their boring literature, their soulless bureaucracies, their disrespectful theories, their insignificant departmental initiatives, their secular pagan materialism, their subtle advocation of socialism, and their own inevitable destitution. We expect them to fly their true colors the moment they realize that we fully intend to keep our money and preserve our culture, and in the near future ye shall witness them coming after us with all the fury of a feminist scorned. All these things shall come to pass, unless the aging liberals sober up and decide to make the Great Books required reading at all universities by the advent of the fall '97 semester.
Ahoy there me more reluctant maties. I know that ye sense the same things as I, I know that these primal truths resonate on some sedated level of yer soul, I know that yer instincts support this 'cause, yet too I see that yer security in the status quo yet makes ye hesitate. Ye consider the concurrent ills to be sufferable, and perhaps the press has convinced ye that things have never been better, that relationships have never been deeper, that literature has never been greater, that culture has never been higher, that people have never been freer, that times have never been more prosperous, that children have never been happier, that abortions have never been more justified, that the national debt has never been better, that marriages have never lasted longer, that TV has never been more entertaining, that the summer's action films have never been more action-packed, that politicians have never been more honest, that government has never done more for ye than it does now, that free love has never been more bountiful and glorious and that people have never been more beautiful, that colleges have never offered a better education, that science has never been more scientific, and that God has never been more unnecessary. Perhaps that is why you're content with being a slacker-- you say what they need ye to say, and ye get yer A. And perhaps ye have figured that ye can do an honest day's work and maintain yer moral independence, without participating in the greater society. This is yer right in a free country, and it is our right too, but it is not our duty. Stay on shore and philosophize, then, for it is our pleasure to absorb the liberal shot, to smell the burning powder, and to demonstrate the Truth's authority upon the WWW, to render conservatism's voice in art, to preserve the better parts of our souls in poetry, to make the culture a safe place for Great Literature, and to resurrect the context in which it can be comprehended. Come resplendent September, we shall once again depart from Ocracoke aboard our heavily armed vessel, perhaps never to return to these shores, but what a small fare that would be to pay for passage to those far greater shores where Moses and the prophets walk in eternal contemplation. By denying the Divine Intellect, the postmodern liberals have taken away everything worth living for in the University, and given the young scholar something worth dying for.
Banish the moral scholar from the University, and you banish the University from the primary purpose of Education. Exile us from your classes, and you exile your classes from the people. Ignore the World's Largest Literary Frigate, and the reality of the World's Higher Consciousness leaves ye in its silvery wake. I say that all the eulogies for the Western Canon, all of the condescending tax-funded scholarly books entitled, THE DEATH OF LITERATURE, or WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMANITIES?, authored by hand-wringing, yet actionless, "objective" scholars, were but the autobiographies of the secular nihilists. A professor's job is to defend the Greats, not to sit idly by while they are desecrated. A soldier's job is to fight for his country, not to sit back in his posh, ivied office and write about how the enemy is winning. But the thing is, these adolescent professors socialize with all the desecrators, and they'd rather be accepted by their embittered peers than serve the Truth that renders the humanities beautiful. Such is the nature of intellectual socialists. These cocktail-party scholars are willing accomplices in the pillaging and plundering of my heritage. They were content to watch it decline, as they never created it, and thus never truly owned it. They were but tenants upon somebody else's land, and they did not pay the rent, nor cut the grass. And we, the pirates of the Western Soul, have come to collect.Literature is that which is immortal within the human soul. When one no longer feels it, it is not the literature that has died, but it is the soul. For long after the feminists have declared language meaningless, somewhere a child shall be exalted by C.S. Lewis. Long after President Shapiro at Princeton and his vindictive troops have completed the deconstruction of Shakespeare, some boy shall copy down one of a Shakespeare's sonnets for a girl, sure as a wronged young man, denied his heritage, his kingdom, and the Truth, shall find a friend in Hamlet.
Mull these things over, matie, for eternal glory goes to those who act on faith, not those who faithlessly act. We hope to have ye aboard The Jolly Roger, come this fall, for the world's greatest adventure.
MY ROAD TRIP WITH F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S GHOST Looking back on it, taking a shortcut through DC at five PM on a Friday probably wasn't the greatest idea I'd ever had. But there had been an accident on I-495 just south of DC, and the traffic had slowed to a standstill. My girlfriend Misty and I were trying to make the Triangle Show at the Princeton reunions, and as we crawled along on by a beckoning exit, I got off 495 so as to take a shortcut through DC.
by Becket "Bluebeard" Knottingham
I had no idea where I was, but I was planning on navigating by the sun, and maintaining a Northbound course, hoping to see signs for 295, 395, 495, or Princeton. But after a few minutes, while we were waiting for the third time at one of those ten-minute DC lights which mocks the gridlock, Misty called my bluff.
"Do you know where you are? It's getting hot-- can you put the top down?"
I hit the button for the top, and I was about to come clean with the navigational situation, but then I realized the name of the cemetery we had come to a standstill beside. It was the Rockville Union Cemetery, where F. Scott Fitzgerald had been buried on Dec. 27th, 1948 at the age of forty-four. Dead from alcoholism, contracted while fleeing postmodernism's rising spectre.
"I found it." I said.
"What?"
"F. Scott Fitzgerald's grave."
I hung a left into the graveyard and we drove on through the rows of gravestones, mausoleums, and monuments, on by the lawn which looked as verdant as a country club fairway in early June, until we came upon F. Scott's unobstrusive, humble gravestone, out at the Southwest corner of the cemetery, shaded by a great old Oak tree. Right where I had read it would be. I was finally going to find out what the epitaph on the tombstone said, and get a picture.
"What time does the Triangle Show start?" Misty asked me as we got out of the car.
"Eight or eight thirty-- but if we get there late, it's free. We're writers." I'd written for the show a few years back, as F. Scott had in his days at Princeton, before he'd flunked out, and I had always gotten into the shows that didn't sell out by saying that I was a writer. I remembered one of the songs I'd composed-- "For a hundred years it's been a wonderful life on this side of paradise"-- a salute to Fitzgerald and the late Jimmy Stewart, both of whom had graced the Triangle Club's stage, back in the oppressive days when Princeton didn't pay fringe feminists immense salaries to write novels glorifying homosexual rape. Back in the dark ages when families stuck together, words meant things, and virgins were somewhat more common than bulimics.
I was humming the tune to myself when I saw It. There, hovering over F. Scott Fitzgerald's grave, was a ghost.
Misty grabbed my arm, and I hers, more startled than afraid; the Ghost floated there in spooky silence. We took a step back towards the car, never taking our eyes off the floating Phantom, and then another step; I could no longer deny that it was drifting towards us, and we bolted.
I jumped into the car without opening the door, and Misty made like a Duke of Hazard too, and then, just as I was throwing the car into first, the ghost followed suit and hopped into the back seat of the convertible. I pealed out with the Spectre in my mustang. And so it is that we often find ourselves running from that which is within our very own nature, or in our car, or something.
There it sat, completely content, upon all the Drake Raft Field Trips and After Dark Field Book Sonnets and Jolly Roger flags and posters that I was taking up to the Princeton reunions so as to let my peers and President Shapiro know that the grungeservative literary revolution had commenced.
"There's a ghost in your car," Misty said, staring straight ahead. "And you're speeding."
"I heard you talking about the Triangle Show," the Ghost suddenly said. It spoke in a totally normal voice, with a tiny tinge of classic snobbery and a hint of condescension. "It's been awhile since I've been to one. What's the theme this year?"
"I don't know." I sort of swallowed.
"Could you please change the music? Everyone who drives on through the graveyard is always listening to this crap, and I don't remember St. Peter saying it was part of my penance."
It was Hootie, and I turned it off.
"Are you F. Scott Fitzgerald's Ghost?" I asked. It didn't say anything. I popped the question again, but it maintained its silence. It just sat there, silent as a liberal radical turned university administrator.
We drove along on by Baltimore in relative quietude, as the Ghost refused to answer any questions. Misty noticed that nobody seemed to be freaking out that we had F. Scott's Ghost in the back seat. Nobody else could see it, I figured, but then again, we were entering the Northeast, where all that is in your car is strictly your business.
Right as we were passing the Walt Whitman Bridge exit outside Philadelphia, I heard a ruckus of windblown paper, along with the sound that a flag makes when caught in an extreme wind, and I looked in the rear-view mirror to see the ghost tossing all The Jolly Roger paraphenelia out of the car, sending the cars behind us into swerving, honking frenzies.
"What are you doing?!" I yelled, as I witnessed some of the skull'n'bone flags and Drake Raft Field Trips flying off over the edge of the bridge, into the harbor.
"I'm trying to get comfortable."
"Those are my books! I was going to sell. . ."
"Blah blah books blah blah books blah." The Ghost said. "Keep your eye on the road. Or you'll kill us all." He laughed.
"You threw all of--"
"Hey-- as if books ever helped me. I was published at your age. This Side of Paradise hit the world when I was twenty four. I was famous for a few days. Big deal. I flunked out of Princeton, died broke, and now pusillanimous professors get posh offices and immense salaries to deconstruct me. So I don't want to hear it. You know what the New York Times said about me when I died?" The Ghost produced a yellowed newspaper clipping, and handed it to Misty. "Read."
Misty read it out loud: "Wrote of Lost Generation. . . F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have invented the so-called younger generation of two decades ago. At any rate, he was the most articulate writer about the rich, young set which was also variously referred to as the lost generation and the post-war generation, and as such he acquired a reputation far out of proportion to his works, which were limited to four novels and several volumes of short stories."
"Far out of proportion, old sport," the Ghost said. "Methinks that newspapers have acquired reputations far out of proportion, along with all the critics, and provosts, and deans, and reporters, and administrations, and educational bureaucracies, and sanctimonius, self-serving, uncreative socialists. For unlike the individual artist, these entities are all faceless, ungraspable, essenceless, without primary principles and the fundamental forms, and their temporary, false redemption is bought by their arrogant blindness, for it hides from them the ironies of their existence which would torture any soul endowed with conscience. That they should deconstruct what the prophets died for, while turning away from the contemporary creators. I suppose it makes sense. But woe onto them, for their blindness cannot hide their doings from God."
"God?" I said. I was sort of surprised to hear F. Scott talking about Him, but I guess he'd figured it out. "I thought--"
"I've been by your website, and it's not bad, but you've got a bad attitude-- advertising with flags and posters at Princeton." The Ghost laughed. "Are you trying to make this into some sort of a circus? This is Literature. They teach creative writing at Princeton-- I wouldn't even admit to writing upon that campus, if I were you. I mean there goes your credibility-- the poet's prize possession. A university is intellectual socialism, and in the postmodern world, those who create and thus own private intellectual property are never welcomed there, until they're dead and their private property can be divied up, deconstructed, misinterpreted, crucified, slandered, belittled, administrated, and used by sniveling scholars to prop up their immense egoes which cannot be borne by their own accomplishments, creativity, nor imagination. Why do you think it's so easy for people like President Shapiro to watch on in complete contentment as the Western Heritage is pillaged, plundered, and desecrated? Because he doesn't own it. If he'd created it, had he an artist's soul rather than a bureaucrat's cunning, had he a conscience and a sense of God and a proclivity towards beauty first beheld or a yearning for the first principles, for the fundamental truths, he would righteously stand forth for all that is noble, and he would defend his inspired anscestors to the intellectual death. He would cherish yesteryear's poet's beautiful words, and the exalting rational beauty of the Greats. But then he wouldn't be President of Princeton. He would've been excommunicated from the postmodern temple long ago. And I say it's not entirely his fault. Your generation of grade-getters and brown-nosers and pagan materialists are perfectly happy to let the resentniks take it all down, as long as they give you A's and write you recommendations for Yale law school. But I say to you that there is but one law, and that it is the law of the Lord, and it is given to all equally, and woe to the wicked who would conceal it and teach their own. Woe unto those who consider themselves beyond Good and Evil, who neglect the divine contemplation of Right and Wrong, and who ultimately believe in but the material, at the expense of that which grants their souls eternal priviledge."
"There's a ghost in the car." Misty said. "And it's saying things."
"If you ever learned to respect the dead, you and your peers could have a renaissance. Your generation doesn't have an author-- they taught you not to read so that the corrupt democratic bureaucrats could empower themselves by handing out teaching positions to those who are inspired more by resent than by beauty. English departments are intellectual welfare states. The humanities are a charity, where the provosts pass out positions has if they were food-stamps. And all the scientists and technologists and economists-- woe onto them for forgetting that money can never be worth more than meaning itself, woe unto them for forgetting that it is not good enough to build the machines, but too, they must be wary of the phantoms which come to haunt them. Einstein was outspoken about the Great Books and abuses of science, but today the predominant fashion is complete silence. It is no longer intellectual to question, or to ponder, or to refute liberal fundamentalism. It is to be accepted on blind faith. With all your tattoos and crap sticking in your face, and your endless array of meaningless relationships, seeking titillation of the superficial senses, and denying the soul's deeper aspects-- you can't think of one." The Ghost said. "You can't think of one author that your generation is united in reading. How conscienceless is your existence, how utterly selfish and empty, sex without love, love without truth, truth without promises, promises without commitment, words without meaning, and ergo, souls without purposes and life without significance. Rich in material possessions, but bankrupt in significance. They used to read me when I was assigned, but even that's been on the wane. They're sedating you guys with ritalin and all the multicultural crap. When I first started out in the Rockville Cemetery, people used to read poetry on dates in the graveyard, but now they just get smashed and do things. Things I don't like talking about. I don't want to spend the weekend hanging up banners and flyers and things for all your smashed peers. I just want to enjoy myself, if that's OK with you."
"I wasn't going to ask you to help me. . ."
"Sure you weren't. I guess you could waste your time hanging flags." The ghost said. "But those who seek shall find. Especially with today's search engines. Think about it-- most of the kids and alums would see a bunch of skull'n'bones flags, and big deal. Ha ha very funny. Let's go to the Bahama's and drink some Captain Morgan's. You're going to need a helluva of a lot more than an advertising campaign to pull off a literary revolution. You're going to need Faith."
"I've got Faith."
The ghost laughed. "Ha." He shook his head. "See, the thing about Princeton is that everyone shows up there looking for the things I owned. The romance, the poetry, the majestic, gothic evenings, the Spirit in the spires and gargoyles, the mystery and mystique. Only most people think that money buys you these things. But it doesn't. Money buys you the appearance of these things, but the essence is owned by the poet's soul. That's President Shapiro's problem. He's an economist attempting to lead men, to educate men, to exalt men, but the liberal psychology has rendered him impotent. If he really wanted to understand the mechanisms of the market, the vitality of man's yearnings, the pricelessness of his dreams, the bonds between a creator and his work, the stock of the soul, he should've majored in poetry. But he strove for second place, perhaps not realizing that first place cannot be bought. Princeton sells the appearance of knowledge, for true knowledge cannot be bought with mere money-- it can only be earned by ardent, passionate contemplation. And I know that you knew that. I knew it too, when I was twenty, but as I got older I forgot. And as a result I have yet awhile to walk this earth, while I'm purged of my faithlessness, and punished for my alcoholism, indulgences, and gluttony. OK, I'll admit it. I thought it was noble, or 'cool', as you might say, to not believe in God. You know, like in The Great Gatsby I had someone point out that Dr. T.J. Eckleberg was just an advertisement. Like how I had Gatsby value Daisy and all that glitters over the Truth, Dignity, and God. I never read any Nietzsche, but that's exactly where I was headed, beyond good and evil, into that pagan realm, where we just unconsciously satiate our appetites, without regard for our eternal souls. You see- I was Gatsby, and his tragedy was mine. I wrote tragedy, and I lived it, and what I'm telling you is that now the time has arrived to write about redemption. Your generation needs it, good sport." He laughed. "I mean dude. When I was writing families stuck together, and we still had the traditions and institutions which were borne by God, and most people still behaved as if there was a Greater Being out there. Tom and Daisy didn't. Sure they were careless and all, and they smashed things and left other people to clean up the mess, but Gatsby was no picnic either. Gatsby didn't believe in God any more than they did, and thus he lacked the strength to turn away from the superficial, glimmering dream, from the worldly desires, and leave Daisy behind. I couldn't either, and now I'm paying for it. I guess I captured the plight of secular humanism at its advent in this century, as I stood on the brink of postmodernism's abyss, and now I say that a moral art is needed, and I say that a moral art shall be authored. In addition to depicting the way that things are, the artist should depict the way things ought to be. It worked for Moses and all the other prophets, and their words shall outlive mine. Ideas have consequences, and in contemplating the greatest ideas throughout all of eternity, one would be wise to contrast the societies that grew up around the Judeo Christian heritage to the societies which sprung forth from Nietzsche's philosophy. Compare the United States of America to the Nazis, the Facists, the Communists, the deconstructionists, and the fringe feminists. And speaking of Moses, lately he's been--"
"I totally--"
"You don't have to say it. I've been there myself, in the roaring twenties, right before the big stock market crash. So here you are, the economy booming, and no inflation. Why no inflation? I'll tell you why. Even the most brilliant economists can't figure this out-- it takes a poet. Inflation occurs when people make more money, as demand rises for material goods, but right now the demand isn't rising for material goods, even though the economy is soaring. Your peers have enough CD's, and no need of a house without a husband or wife they can trust. The demand is rising for spiritual goods, and these spiritual goods, such as promises that endure, words that mean things, politicians who speak the truth, and families that stay together, are in short supply, because nobody's making them anymore. The secular economists like President Shapiro couldn't put a price on them, so they excluded them from their calculations of the GNP. How much is a father worth to a child? How much is a devoted husband worth to a mother? How much is rhyming, meaningful poetry worth to a generation's conscience? And so it is that even though the economy is booming, you're not all that psyched about running out and getting a new snow board. You'd rather have a context in which young couples read poetry in the park and dream of eternity. Now this is very depressing for Wall Street, but I don't think your generation can help it, and you should not be chastised for failing to respond to Viacom's marketing campaigns. Your generation's parties makes mine look like a tupperware parties. I thought I was being pretty racey when I wrote about stealing a kiss outside during a dance, but now your peers leave the dance floor to give birth and toss the kid in the trash. It's a left up here-- you're going to miss 206. What I'm saying is that I want you to have a good time here at the Princeton reunions. I want you and Misty here to walk in the shadows of the spires and gargoyles, and exalt in the private silence of the observing artist. I want you live the poetry, and I'll take care of the rest. When are you headed back?"
"Sunday."
"Well don't leave without me. I wasn't even supposed to take the weekend off, and if I don't get back, there'll be hell to pay, if you know what I mean. But if I can get you on the right track, He can't be too angry, even though I'm not supposed to be doing any angel work right now. I'm not supposed to start working for my wings until my Pennance is completed. I just hope I can get everything done and make the trip worthwhile."
"We'll get ya."
"Can I ask a question?" Misty asked. "How'd you know my name?"
