Potholes on the Infobahn: Everybody complains about not being able to find things on the internet. My problem is, I keep stumbling across stuff I really didn’t want to find. Call it negative serendipity. For decades I’ve been going around saying, If Doris Lessing had a penis she would’ve won a Nobel Prize long ago. So great is my admiration that I actually retain a few verbatim lines from the early novels which I trot out when the occasion calls for under-appreciated appercus. The Golden Notebook, The Four-gated City, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Summer Before the Dark, ah, what glorious insights beneath the mid-century surface. I even followed her to the stars in the serpentine byways of the later science-fiction period. Then just the other day I was browsing the net—an activity I am now coming to see as not unlike walking through a minefield—when I came upon a link to a recent Lessing article. Click-click, and there I am, looking at her eulogy for Idries Shah, along with another link to an interview with her. Happily nostalgic (I hadn’t read her for several years), I naively plunged in. Alas. It turns out my adored one, my nominee for the Big Prize, has for decades been a disciple—a disciple!, Doris, you free-thinker you, how could you?—of Mr. Shah, well-known for his promotion of the Sufi way of looking at the world. And suddenly the novels, which the moment before had seemed to me among the bravest attempts in this craven century at opening new paths beyond the reductivist blind alley which has brought us to such technological luxury and such metaphysical poverty, were reduced to little more than highfalutin equivalents of The Watchtower, more forced religious tracts handed out on the street corner. Wounded but still hopeful, I even went so far as to go back and re-read Shah’s The Sufis to see whether I had been right in my intrigued dismissal of it years ago as a clever but nonetheless short-sightedly ethnocentric work of philosophical gamesmanship. Result? I will only say that I do not expect to re-read Lessing. It is one thing for the net to lead one into the crumbling mortar of the biographical interstices of one’s cultural idols. After rumination, one can see that experience as a healthful correction of early misjudgments. It turns out the cyber-minefield can strike much closer to home—and heart. Seduced by the various portals touting their "people-finders," I got out my oldest address book—this from a time before Rolodexes, the one from that decade which, in spite of everything, still has a certain millennial, paradisiacal aura about. Yes, the 60s, when I taught class after class of the best and the brightest, the hippest and the coolest, the farthest-out and the most creatively foul-mouthed. And (what a fool) I set out to track down people whom I had known when they were so young that they were hardly yet people but whom I remembered as the rock n roll-intoxicated, drug-laced hope of the world. I found plenty. Two examples will indicate the foolhardiness of my search. Marla. SDS firebrand, anti-war activist, free-loving proto-feminist, with an incisive, self-ironic intellect that left more than a few shriveled penises in its wake. Marla, Marla. A probing e-mail from me produced a rather lengthy response, telling me rather more, in fact a lot more, than I really wanted or needed to know. Now resident in Santa Monica, former movie critic for various hip Southland publications, occasional contributor to NPR, Marla has for some years been supported by her boyfriend who spends his weekdays in San Jose adding to his Web-based millions and weekends in L.A. with Marla, being wholly supportive of her attempts to transmogrify the demon-memories of her Tulsa upbringing into a novel-movie deal. And Patrick. The next Wittgenstein? Norman O. Brown, Jr.? It seemed not only possible, but likely, so brilliant was the young mind, so insightful the mots which, stoned or unstoned, he tossed off with utter lack of pretension. (That he and Marla had been lovers for a semester is hardly surprising.) The Rhodes Scholarship was only fitting. Patrick, Patrick. The quick exchange of e-mails just about did me in. Tenured at the top, a string of po-mo books behind him, Patrick, now on wife no. 3, is househusband, doting on his two-year-old daughter, contemplating it all through a haze of Prozac. The world, the drug, the tenure—something had robbed him of that marvelous creative edge of long ago. Follow-up e-mails were avoided by all parties. And of course everyone was kind enough not to mention the shards of their own illusions about me…
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