Wild Ducks Flying Backward (9 page)

Miniskirt Feminism

E
ven though as a novelist and as a person I have long since left the period behind me, I remain convinced that the years 1964–72 were spiritually and politically the most momentous our nation has ever known, a time (destined to be endlessly maligned and misunderstood) when actual transcendence was in the air, and the words “land of the free and the home of the brave” began to be taken literally by some Americans, much to the chagrin of others.

Yet, considering all the ferment, foment, experimentation, and illumination that characterized the era, I must say it had some surprising aesthetic deficiencies, particularly in the realm of furnishings and décor.

While the myriad thrift-shop tapestries, Persian carpets, overstuffed sofas, beaded lampshades, peacock feathers, incense burners, macramé wall hangings, paisley cushions, and florid neo-Nouveau poster art provided a soft, tactile, sensually rich environment in which to get congenially, entertainingly, and even enlighteningly stoned, there was something about it—the clutter, the closeness, the inevitable moth-eaten dustiness and fake Orientalism of it—that was as cloying as the parlor of a Victorian vicar.

Whether I inhaled or not, it made me want to cough.

The rooms I chose to inhabit back then are very much like the ones I dwell in now: interiors in which an array of clean, bold, simple, primary colors are set against a background of starkest white. My décor guru has always been Matisse, to whom I’ve instinctively turned in matters of taste, shunning the busy business of Klimt, Beardsley, and Jerry Garcia. Having said that, however, I can think of two material items from the 60’s that ought to be honored: the miniskirt for its glorious debut, the brassiere for the martyrdom it suffered in exile.

The widespread donning of the miniskirt and doffing of the bra symbolized a burbling rebellion against constraint—sexual, societal, political, and religious. Among other things, our culture was being refeminized, and unharnessed women in abbreviated loin-wrappings—looking good, feeling free!—expressed this in a way every bit as direct and immediate as men in frilly collars and waist-length hair. Old boundary lines were blurring like wet mascara, and much of the land was giddy with the hashish of social change. Humans, hopes, hemlines: all were as high as kites.

It wasn’t merely that miniskirts (and their sisters in emancipated style, hot pants) were sexy. Rather, they were sexy in a decidedly playful way, a playfulness which carried over into many other aspects of life.

People were being playful in the face of adversity, violence, and turmoil. That’s the sort of playfulness that can transcend whimsy and frivolity to become a form of wisdom, a means of survival, a kind of grace. Women might protest an unjust war or battle for civil rights, but as evidenced by their attire, they refused to let the issues of the day make victims of them or drag them down into dowdy despair.

Eventually, of course, the pendulum swung. On the one hand, the old Judeo-Christian fear of license precipitated a vicious backlash. On the other, when the mainstream press finally got around to embracing thigh-flash and bra smoke as definitive of and essential to the “with-it” modern woman, the spirit of mischief and revolt was compromised and all the fun expired. The party was over. Brassieres rose from the ashes and resumed their erstwhile duties. It was the miniskirt’s turn to be burned.

Short-short skirts have come back several times since then. But you know I’m right when I say it’s not the same. Indeed, it may no longer be possible to stitch a zeitgeist into a few square inches of cloth.

Ah, but while it lasted, the 60’s miniskirt was a sight to behold. More than a garment, it was a flag without a country, a banner without a slogan, a pennant without a team. Leather or satin, snug or flared, smooth or pleated, sassy or coyly demure, it was the all-embracing banderole that flew from the masthead of a heroic escapade. It was the happy standard of the heart.

The New York Times,
1995

The Sixties

I
t must be really irritating to have come of age in the 1980’s or 90’s to find your decade—your very own historical moment— persistently overshadowed by The Decade That Will Not Die, the ten years that have stolen the show of the twentieth century and hogged the cultural limelight for as long as you can recall. Not only are the 1960’s a hair (a long hair) in your generational soup, but if you’re a thinking person you’re aware of both the fallacy of decadism and how dangerous and dumb it can be to embalm yourself in the attractive amber of the past.

In most of our lives, for better or for worse, there occurs a period of peak experience, a time when we are at our best, when we meet some challenge, endure some ordeal, receive some special recognition, have some sustained, heretofore unimaginable fun, or just feel consistently happy and free. There’s a tendency then to become psychologically frozen in that glad ice, turning ourselves into living fossils for the remainder of our existence.

For females, the retrograde flypaper is often summer camp or high school. For far too many American males, it has been the armed services; the one time in their lives when, relieved of parents, wives, children, dull routines, and responsibilities, their every need supported, they could enjoy camaraderie, travel, and adventure. An awful lot of America’s leaders never outgrew their wartime exploits, and these old padnags—waving red-white-and-blue cattle prods and farting the low notes of the Star-Spangled Banner—have over and over again insisted on military solutions to economic disputes, a manifestation of arrested development for which the world has paid a hard and ugly price.

Gray-haired flower children, while infinitely more benign, can seem almost equally foolish. Yet it would be a mistake—a smug distortion—to dismiss the 60’s as just an ordinary fucked-up decade with a good press agent. Not only did the 60’s
differ
from the 50’s, the 80’s, the 90’s, etc., they were in several significant ways
superior
to them; superior, for example, in the expenditure of both passion and compassion, superior in the number of romantic seekers and idealistic questers (bless them each and every one) searching for something more substantial than material success. From the perspective of the so-called counterculture (for a time, the “counterculture” functioned as the dominant culture), music was less superficial then, authority less respected, violence less tolerated, love less fettered, wealth less worshiped, power less coveted, guilt less shouldered, depression less indulged, and fear less shivered with. In the 60’s, beauty had not yet been voted out of office by the art community, flirting hadn’t been demonized as sexual harassment by the cops of correctness, and tickets to any number of nirvanas could be easily obtained at any number of outlets, ancient or futuristic, although as Hermann Hesse once cautioned us, “the Magic Theater is not for everyone.”

Illumination, like it or not, is an elitist condition. In every era and in almost every area, there have resided tiny minorities of enlightened individuals living their lives just beyond the threshold, having prematurely breached the gateway to what conceivably could be humanity’s next evolutionary phase, a phase whose actualization—if it’s to come at all—is probably still many years down the line. In certain key periods of history, one or another of those elitist minorities has become sufficiently large and resonant to affect the culture as a whole.

Think of the age of Akhenaton in Egypt, the reign of Zoroaster in Persia, the golden ages of Greece and Islam, the several great periods of Chinese culture, and the European Renaissance. Something similar was brewing in America in the years 1964 to 1972.

Maybe it’s sentimental, if not actually stupid, to romanticize the 60’s as an embryonic golden age. Obviously, this fetal age of enlightenment aborted. Nevertheless, while they lasted, the 60’s were extraordinary. Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, they constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of earthlings briefly realized their moral potential and flirted with their neurological destiny; a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the brutal and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once again the thick curtains of meathead somnambulism.

There’s something else: I think it need be established, firmly, flatly, and finally, that what we call the 60’s would never have happened had it not been for the introduction of psychedelic drugs into the prevailing American paradigm.

Certainly, there would have been protests, boycotts, and demonstrations, but they would have been only a fraction of the magnitude of those that actually occurred; they would have been far less frequent, widespread, intense, colorful, or effective.

The political and societal juggernaut of the 60’s rolled on wheels of music, and that music owed both its aesthetic and ethical impetus to psychedelics. Eyes and hearts were opened—frequently by way of the ears—to fresh perceptions and utopian possibilities.

It was a dizzy period of transcendence and awareness: transcendence of compromised and obsolete value systems, awareness of the enormity and richness of a previously unsuspected inner reality. Its zeitgeist, despite what you may have heard, was only secondarily political. As much as it’s been emphasized by uncomprehending journalists, the political movements of the time (be they pacifist, feminist, environmental, or racial) were largely the result of fallout from a
spiritual
explosion.

Now, in 1996 the word “spiritual” is, unfortunately, highly suspect. Yet, the changes in consciousness and in conscience that characterized and energized the 60’s were of a sort that could only be described as oceanic. And they were a direct outgrowth of drug-inspired mysticism.

Thus, I contend that to talk about the 60’s today without talking about, say, psilocybin, marijuana, and LSD, as, except in derisive asides, the media has been doing ad infinitum, is to be guilty of the most dishonest sort of revisionism. Moreover, a panel on the 60’s that ignores or downplays the contribution of psychedelics would be akin to a panel on eggs that ignores or downplays the contribution of hens.

In closing, let me confess that were I granted a single ride in a time machine, I would
not
choose to be beamed back to 1967. No, as indelibly as that year is branded in the tissue of my memory, as exhilarating as it sometimes is to evoke, I’ve been there, done that, and I’d probably elect to travel instead to Paris during
La Belle Époque;
or to fifteenth-century Japan, where I might hit the meditation mat, the mountain trails, the sake bars, and the brothels with my idol, Ikkyu Sojun. However, my refusal to cling to my formative years doesn’t mean that I’ll ever sit quietly while clueless hacks, tedious scoldmuffins, and secretly envious kids malign a period of our recent history that towered above all others in shining promise, regardless of the fractures that promise may have suffered when it eventually fell off the ladder.

Introductory remarks at a panel discussion, Northwest Book Fest, 1996. Point No Point, 1996

Diane Keaton

A
female circus clown was appearing at a shopping mall recently when a small child in the audience suddenly climbed onto her lap and gazed at her painted face with rapturous recognition. The child’s mother began to weep. “My little boy is autistic,” she explained. “This is the first time he has ever let another human touch him.”

That incident reminded me of the actress Diane Keaton, and not because she sometimes looks as if P. T. Barnum dresses her. In her state of goofy grace, you see, Keaton possesses a kind of reality denied to ordinary beings. A kachina, a wondernik, a jill-o’-lantern, she is such an incandescent link to otherness that we introverts emerge blinking from our hiding holes and beg to have those strange hands touch us.

If she’s some kind of phosphorescent flake, some kooky angel circling the ethers in deep left field; whether she won the eccentricity competition in the Miss California pageant or was actually in Istanbul at the time, none of that matters to those of us who love her. Give us half a chance and we’d lick hot fudge from her fingers, spank her with a ballet slipper, read aloud to her the sacred moon poems of Kalahari bushmen. What’s more, we
like
the way she dresses.

Fantasies of compatibility aside, however, the fact is, if sex appeal was two grains of rice, Diane Keaton could feed the Chinese army. (No? When was the last time you watched
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
?)

Her allure is partly due to the manner in which she combines a saucy bohemian brilliance with an almost disabling vulnerability, partly due to the hormonal aura of baby fat (tender and juicy) that surrounds her even when she is mature and svelte. Mainly, though, it’s because of her smile—a smile that could paint Liberace’s ceiling, butter a blind man’s waffles, and slush the accumulated frosts of Finland Station.

The bonus of this beauteous and beatific bozo is that the older she gets, the sexier she gets. By the time she’s fifty, she may have to wear a squid mask for self-protection.

Esquire,
1987

Kissing

K
issing is our greatest invention. On the list of great inventions, it ranks higher than the Thermos bottle and the Airstream trailer; higher, even, than room service, possibly because the main reason room service was created was so that people could stay in bed and kiss without going hungry.

The mirror is a marvelous invention, as well, yet its genesis didn’t require a truckload of imagination, the looking glass being merely an extension of pond surface, made portable and refined. Kissing, on the other hand, didn’t imitate nature so much as it restructured it. Kissing molded the face into a brand-new shape, the pucker shape, and then, like some renegade scientist grafting plops of sea urchin onto halves of ripe pink plums, it found a way to fuse the puckers, to meld them and animate them, so that one pucker rubbing against another generates heat, moisture, and a luminous neuro-muscular friction. Thomas Edison, switch off your dim bulb and slink away!

Tradition informs us that kissing, as we know it, was invented by medieval knights for the utilitarian purpose of determining whether their wives had been tapping the mead barrel while the knights were away on Crusades. If history is accurate for once, the kiss began as an osculatory wire tap or oral snoop, a kind of alcoholic chastity belt, after the fact. Form is not always faithful to function, however, and gradually, kissing for kissing’s sake became popular in the courts, spreading (trickle-down ergonomics) to tradesmen, peasants, and serfs. And why not? Transcending class and financial status, completely democratic in its mysterious capacity to deliver cascading pangs of immediate physical and emotional pleasure, kissing proved inherently if irrationally
sweet
. It was as if that modicum of atavistic sweetness still remaining in civilized western man was funneled into kissing and kissing alone.

Kissing is the supreme achievement of the
western
world. Orientals, including those who tended the North American continent before the land developers arrived from Europe in the 16th century, rubbed noses, and millions still do. Yet, despite the golden cornucopia of their millennia—they gave us yoga and gunpowder, Buddha and pasta—they, their multitudes, their saints and sages, never produced a kiss. (Oh, sure, the
Rig Veda,
a four-thousand-year-old Hindu text, makes reference to kissing, but who knows the precise nature of the activity to which the Sanskrit word alludes? Modern Asians, of course, have taken up kissing much as they’ve taken up the fork, though so far, they haven’t improved upon it as they usually do with those foreign things they adopt.)

Kissing is the flower of the
civilized
world. So-called primitives, savages, Pygmies, and cannibals have shown tenderness to one another in many tactile ways, but pucker against pucker has not been their style. Tropical Africans touched lips, you say? Quite right, many of them did, as did aboriginal peoples in other parts of the world. Ah, but although their lips may have touched, they did not linger. And let’s admit it, the peck is not much more than a square wheel, sterile and slightly ominous. With what else did Judas betray the Big Guy but a peck: terse, spit-free, and tongueless?

Kissing is the glory of the
human
species. All animals copulate but only humans osculate. Parakeets rub beaks? Sure they do, but only little old ladies who murder schoolchildren with knitting needles to steal their lunch money so that they can buy fresh kidneys to feed overweight kitty cats would place bird billing in the realm of the true kiss. There are primatologists who claim that apes exchange oral affection, but from here, the sloppy smacks of chimps look pretty incidental: at best, they’re probably just checking to see if their mates have been into the fermented bananas. No, arbitrary beast-to-beast snout nuzzling may give narrators of wildlife films an opportunity to plumb new depths of anthropomorphic cuteness, but on Aphrodite’s radar screen, it makes not a blip.

Psychologists claim that talking to our pets is a socially acceptable excuse for talking to ourselves. That may cast a particularly narcissistic light on those of you who
kiss
your pets, but you shouldn’t let it stop you. Smooch your bulldog if you’re so inclined. Buss your sister, your uncle, your grandpa, and anybody’s bouncing baby. No kiss is ever wasted, not even on the lottery ticket kissed for luck. Kiss trees. Favorite books. Bowling balls. Old Jews sometimes kiss their bread before eating it, and those are good kisses, too. They resonate in the ozone.

The best kisses, though, are those between lovers, because those are the consequential ones, the risky ones, the transformative ones, the ones that call the nymphs and satyrs back to life, the many-layered kisses that we dive into as into a fairy-tale frog pond or the murky gene pool of our origins.

The fact that we enjoy watching others kiss may be less a matter of voyeurism than some sort of homing instinct. In any case, it explains the popular appeal of Hollywood and Paris. Who can forget the elastic thread of saliva that for one brief but electrifying second connected Yvonne De Carlo to Dan Duryea in
Black Bart
? And didn’t Joni Mitchell’s line “in France they kiss on Main Street” inspire hundreds of the romantically susceptible to pack their breath mints and head for Orly?

A final thought: beware the man who considers kissing as nothing more than duty, a sop to the “weaker” sex, an annoyingly necessary component of foreplay. That man has penis plaque in his arteries and will collapse under the weight of intimacy. Send him off to the nearest golf course while those of us who are more evolved celebrate the unique graces of the kiss:

No other flesh like lip flesh! No meat like mouth meat! The musical clink of tooth against tooth! The wonderful curiosity of tongues!

Playboy,
1990