New Haven Motel 6 Vortex Sutra

A bauhaus sickroom fever meditation on the evil of our days

Incantations

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times,
even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Sacred Heart my Christ acceptable
        Allah the compassionate one
                Jaweh Righteous One
            all Knowledge-Princes of Earth-man, all
    ancient Seraphim of heavenly Desire, Devas, yogis
            & holymen I chant to—
                Come to my lone presence
                    into this Vortex named Kansas,
I lift my voice aloud,
    make Mantra of American language now,
            I here declare the end of the War!

                Ancient days’ Illusion!—
        and pronounce words beginning my own millennium.
Let the States tremble,
    let the nation weep,
        let Congress legislate its own delight,
            let the President execute his own desire—
this Act done by my own voice,
                nameless Mystery—
published to my own senses,
        blissfully received by my own form
    approved with pleasure by my sensations
        manifestation of my very thought
        accomplished in my own imagination
            all realms within my consciousness fulfilled

— from Allen Ginsberg’s 1966 antiwar poem Wichita Vortex Sutra

Welcome, new readers!

Sundman figures it out! is an autobiographical meditation, in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne, of a 71 72 year old guy who lives with his wife in a falling-down house on a dirt road on Martha’s Vineyard that dead-ends into a nature preserve.

Hobbyhorses and preoccupations appear, fade, reappear and ramify at irregular intervals.

If you like this essay, I suggest checking out a few from the archives. These things are all interconnected.

Précis

Seventeen days ago, four hours after driving off the Martha’s Vineyard ferry at Woods Hole, in America, I became ill en route from Massachusetts to New Jersey. I was heading to Little Falls to attend the funeral of a beloved uncle.¹ I didn’t get there.

Although I had felt fine when I drove onto the ferry in Vineyard Haven, by the time I drove over the Q Bridge in New Haven I had fever and chills, and I decided it was time for me to turn around and head home. But I was soon too sick to even attempt that. I wound up spending two days in a Motel 6 in Branford in a feverish state with Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe playing on autorepeat in my head.

It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day
I was out choppin' cotton and my brother was balin' hay
And at dinnertime we stopped and walked back to the house to eat
And Mama hollered out the back door, 'Y'all remember to wipe your feet!'
And then she said I got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge
Today Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

Too sick to go to a funeral; too weak to turn around and drive home; unable to think of anything other than a Southern gothic lament about a boy without a lick of sense who drowned himself in a muddy river.

I think there’s some kind of metaphor there, maybe, but I can’t find it. Anyway, this post is a meditation on our current predicament inspired by that Motel 6 sickroom stay.

‘Ode to Billie Joe’ in the Summer of Love

A little further down this post there’s an embedded video of Bobbie Gentry singing Ode to Billie Joe, so if you want to hear it now you can just scroll down. But I’ll start with a little background for those readers who are not of my dinosauric age and don’t remember how Gentry’s haunting lament saturated the airwaves in the summer of 1967.

Wikipedia’s entry on the song, lightly edited by me:

"Ode to Billie Joe" is a song by American singer-songwriter Bobbie Gentry released by Capitol Records in July 1967, and later used as the title-track of her debut album. Five weeks after its release, the song topped Billboard's Pop singles chart. It also appeared in the top 10 of the Adult Contemporary and Hot R&B singles charts, and in the top 20 of the Hot Country Songs list.

The song takes the form of a first-person narrative performed over sparse acoustic guitar accompaniment with strings in the background. It tells of a rural Mississippi family's reaction to the news of the suicide of Billie Joe McAllister, a local boy to whom the daughter (and narrator) is connected. Although ample clues exist for the young woman’s brother, mother and father to figure out that she was involved with Billie Joe, they are too wrapped up in themselves to notice.

The summer of 1967 was a happening time. On May 26th the Beatles released their epochal album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and it would be hard to overstate the influence of that masterpiece. (I’m not going to describe either the album or its influence, as millions of words have been written on those topic & you can find some if you want to. I’ll only say that on the Saturday morning when it was first available for sale my father drove me to the Two Guys from Harrison store in Wayne, where I waited in line for nearly an hour to get my copy. I was 14 years old. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band filled me with wonder and joy. And A Day in the Life really shook me up.)

In the summer of 1967 the war in Vietnam was near its peak intensity with nearly half a million U.S. troops ‘in theatre;’ more than 11,000 of them were killed that year. But in the USA it was the ‘Summer of Love’. Per Wikipedia, “The Summer of Love was a major social phenomenon that occurred in San Francisco during the summer of 1967. As many as 100,000 people, mostly young people, hippies, beatniks, and 1960s counterculture figures, converged in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and Golden Gate Park.”

The Beatles’ All You Need Is Love was written specifically for a worldwide television broadcast called Our World, which was the first-ever live global television broadcast, on June 25, 1967, and was watched by 400 million people worldwide.

Scott McKenzie’s treacly song San Francisco (wear flowers in your hair) was a big hit. Psychedelia was everywhere, everything was larger than life. Jimi Hendrix! Jefferson Airplane! Smoke pot! Take LSD! Put flowers in your hair, because all you need is love!

Against this background, Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe was astoundingly downbeat and understated. It was, frankly, shocking.

And Papa said to Mama as he passed around the blackeyed peas
'Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits please
There's five more acres in the lower forty I got to plow'
And Mama said it was shame about Billie Joe, anyhow
Seems like nothin' ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge
And now Billie Joe MacAllister's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

Living it up at the Motel Connecticut

At New Haven I found someplace to get off I-95 South and onto I-95 North. I crossed back over the Q-bridge and took the next exit on the idea that I was in Connecticut only 50 miles from New York City, which meant by simple logic there would be a cheap motel nearby.

Distracted by how poorly I was feeling, I stopped at the wrong place for a red light and nearly got smashed into by a series of cars going fifty miles an hour who managed to miss hitting me by an inch or two. It was a miracle I didn’t get killed, but soon enough I came upon a kind of mirror-world Hotel California, a sort of Motel Connecticut —

Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim, I had to stop for the night

It was a Motel 6 adjacent to Capone’s Pizza. I woozily pulled into a parking spot near the entrance. The process of getting a room and paying for it was almost too confusing for me to accomplish, but I managed it.

Then, somehow, feeling weak as a kitten, I was in an eerily spare room that looked like the one in the picture below.

I took off my clothes and flopped down on the bed. I had a headache and had started to sneeze a storm. I felt sick at my stomach. I called my wife Betty to let her know where I was and texted my sister Muggs to let her know I wouldn’t be attending Uncle Harry’s funeral. Just getting those two messages out took a lot of effort.

‘It must be the covid that’s come back again,’ I said to myself². That’s when I began to hear Ode to Billie Joe playing in my head.

And Brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billie Joe
Put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show
And wasn't I talkin' to him after church last Sunday night?
I'll have another piece of apple pie, you know it don't seem right
I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge
And now you tell me Billie Joe's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

Here comes the bends again

Since January 29. I’ve made at least 15 false starts on this essay — wrong-footed rabbit-holing, trying to find something worth saying, feeling guilty, again, about shortchanging my paying subscribers. This post marks the end of the longest drought in Sundman figures it out! history. Sorry friends; I guess baby’s got the bends again.

Over on Bluesky, longtime SFIO! reader Chris Karr posted this:

This is the challenge that has stymied me: how do I find something worth saying in these awful times that isn’t just ‘the same Resistance memes and reposts over and over and over,’ nor yet just another recapitulation of the most recent awful news — there are plenty of good writers who do that better than I could — but which doesn’t either ignore the reality of the catastrophe we’re all living through.

Here’s a catalog of some of my failed SFIO! efforts:

I wrote an essay about the seminal punk anthem Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols in which I compared Elon Musk to Johnny Rotten and Trump to Sid Vicious. Musk has none of the charisma that John Lydon once had, I wrote, but now Lydon’s an obese MAGA who long ago ran out of charm himself; Trump and Sid share the same abject nihilism — and histories of wives/lovers who died under sketchy circumstances. So maybe there’s some kind of correspondence.

I am an Antichrist
I am an anarchist
Don't know what I want but I know how to get it
I wanna destroy the passersby
'Cause I, 
I wanna be,
Anarchy

One of these two nihilists contributed at least a few things of value during their short time on Earth. The other one, nothing, ever.

I thought I had the kernel of an essay but I was wrong. Because the Sex Pistols were only a punk band offering a bit of social commentary and a chance for young disaffected people to blow off some steam — they weren’t even anarchists.

(According to Wikipedia, Lydon said in a 2012 interview that he never was an anarchist, adding "Anarchy is mind games for the middle class." In a 2022 op-ed he wrote, "Anarchy is a terrible idea. Let's get that clear. I'm not an anarchist. And I'm amazed that there are websites out there – .org anarchist sites – funded fully by the corporate hand and yet ranting on about being outside the shitstorm. It's preposterous.")

Whereas Musk and Trump and the lawless gangs they lead actually are anarchists, and they really are out to destroy the United States of America as a constitutional democracy. It’s not a joke. They’re a real threat to every person on earth.

Also, Anarchy in the UK as performed by the Sex Pistols is actually kind of cool, but there is nothing cool about what’s going on in Trumplandia now. My whole essay was forced and stupid. I deleted it after spending way too much time on it.

Then I wrote an essay about Easter Island and how societies collapse (as ours surely seems to be collapsing right now), and about Jared Diamond (who said that the ecology of Easter Island collapsed because the people who lived there, instead of dealing rationally with deforestation and other threats, chose to put their energy into carving giant stone idols) and about Diamond’s critics who said he was wrong, that it was the arrival of Europeans that doomed that society; and how the Mongol invasion of Europe in the 1200’s led to the collapse of other civilizations, and on, and on. I spent a lot of time on that essay too, but, like my Anarchy in the UK essay, it was also ultimately forced and stupid, and I deleted it.

Then I started writing about the monstrous dismantling of USAID. But as some readers of this gazette know well, I lived for nearly two years in a small African village during a time of famine, pestilence and drought, where most of the food that I and my fellow villagers ate came in burlap bags bearing the the USAID logo and the words “From the People of the United States of America” — I know more about being kept alive by USAID than 999,999 out of every one million Americans — and writing about this subject so enrages me that I think it’s probably best that I stay away from it for now lest I succumb to apoplexy.

I struggled with a fourth essay about how societies like ours decide which scientific endeavors (particle accelerators, space-based telescopes, studies of the structure of tail fibers of bacteriophage, the saliva of gila monster lizards. . .) to fund or not fund. I wanted to say something about science as the bulwark of modern civilization against the profoundly anti-civilizational force (the Trump - Putin axis) we face.

But although I think that that essay did have real potential, it became just too fucking depressing to think about, as the MAGA/Doge-gang/Nazi/antivax Republican-Christofascists have already done massive and irreparable damage to the scientific infrastructure of the United States — one the greatest achievements in the history of humanity, blown up out of sheer nihilistic, anarchistic ignorance and fury. How can I write about the trade-offs inherent in funding science when it’s not even clear that science will be an ongoing enterprise in the United States two years from now?

Republican congressmen and senators planning the future of science in the United States of America

So then I started another essay about science and its enemies, and about the GI Bill that created the American college and university system which led to the creation of the great middle class, and about the backlash against knowledge and science and reason that began with Ronald Reagan, the ultimate progenitor of today’s Republican Party, whose implicit motto is Ignorance is Strength; and about the MAGA-like destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria — which contained the complete Arithmetica of Diophantus, half of which has seemingly been lost to humanity forever — bringing on the dark ages.

Mama said to me, Child, what's happened to your appetite?
I've been cookin' all mornin' and you haven't touched a single bite
That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today
Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way
He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge
And she and Billie Joe was throwing somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge

And I started to write about the utility, or lack thereof, of mathematics, and how Andrew Wile’s search for a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem echoed the search of Uncle Petros for a proof of Goldbach’s conjecture, which I wrote about not too long ago. But I know next to nothing about mathematics. I don’t know what I want to say about it. That essay fizzled.

And I kept telling myself, ‘John, this is exactly the state that our enemies are trying to put us all in — this feeling of powerlessness, of being overwhelmed.’ ‘But of course,’ I answered myself, ‘just knowing that our enemies are trying to induce the bends doesn’t help me escape them.’

I started an essay about my Uncle Harry, whose funeral I missed. And someday I’ll finish that one. But my heart wasn’t in it. The time isn’t right.

The house in which I grew up with my parents & six brothers and sisters and Nana and Pop (my father’s mother and father), and Uncle Harry, Nana’s twin sister’s orphaned son. Until Harry went into the Marines his room was that little addition at the back. After he left my brother Mike & I moved in.

And as I struggled with all of these tangled thoughts, one aimless failed essay after another, the thing I kept coming back to was the sensation of lying in a bed in a nightmarish bauhaus Motel 6 room, not looking at my phone or laptop or the TV, just doing almost nothing for 40 hours straight but sleeping, getting up every once in a while to use the toilet, and feverishly playing and replaying Ode to Billie Joe in my head.

A year has come and gone since we heard the news 'bout Billie Joe
And brother married Becky Thompson, they bought a store in Tupelo
There was a virus goin' 'round, Papa caught it and he died last spring
And now mama doesn't seem to wanna do much of anything
And me, I spend a lot of time pickin' flowers up on Choctaw Ridge
And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge

Asking the wrong question about Billie Joe

Over on Treble magazine I found a great essay about Ode to Billie Joe and I hope you’ll go read the whole thing. Here’s the kicker (which I’ve condensed):

There isn’t any mystery about the death of Billie Joe—he died because he jumped off the bridge. But in the fourth verse a detail emerges upon which the events surrounding his death potentially hinge. As the narrator, stricken with grief, is hassled by her mother due to her lack of appetite, Mama lets slip that a young preacher, Brother Taylor, “saw a girl that looked like a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge/And she and Billie Joe was throwin’ something off the Tallahatchie Bridge.” Here, essentially, is where the fascination with the story at the center of “Ode to Billie Joe”—and it’s certainly a captivating story—essentially capture’s the public’s imagination. What did they throw off the bridge?

It’s hard not to be wrapped up in that one small piece of the puzzle—the thing that might offer some kind of answer as to why this fictional character we know so little about decided to end his life by plunging off of a bridge and into the river below.

But “Ode to Billie Joe” isn’t a murder mystery. It’s a study of grief and the absence of empathy, or in Gentry’s own words, an “unconscious cruelty.” The reason that the preacher saw a girl that looked a lot like the narrator on Choctaw Ridge is because it was her, and Billie Joe was her boyfriend, and now he’s dead. And nobody in her family seems to get that, or for that matter, care. She’s grieving and her mother tells her she needs to eat more. But she also can’t bring herself to say anything about it either. And a cruel twist of irony comes in the final verse, a year after Billie Joe’s death, when the narrator’s father dies and “mama doesn’t seem to want to do much of anything.” She’s given no empathy either, and this family stricken by two tragedies in the course of a year somehow just can’t or won’t offer each other support.

When you dig beneath the surface, “Ode to Billie Joe” has a sadness to it that taps into something everyone’s probably experienced at one time or another—how sometimes a person’s pain is simply inconvenient to others. But look, when I first heard the song, I was caught up in the mystery of what was thrown off the bridge too. It’s almost as if Gentry, who sings her tale as coolly and as detached as the family gathered around the dinner table, left it there as bait, if only to prove her point. And here we are, overlooking a quiet moment of grief because of a possible red herring.

Not that any of us can be blamed, really. “Ode to Billie Joe” is just too fantastic of a song, too eerily orchestrated, too brilliantly written.

In other words, the real question at the heart of Ode to Billie Joe is not ‘what did those two young lovers throw off the bridge?’ but ‘where does this casual cruelty come from, and what can we do about it?’

I note that there’s a word for ‘casual cruelty.’ That word is ‘evil.’

Maybe that’s what my fevered brain was trying to tell me: that that’s my real subject.

Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti in the Vortex

I, like many readers of the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, do not consider Wichita Vortex Sutra to be among his greatest poems. But yet there is something to it, something in how he keeps struggling to understand how the people of the United States can be so indifferent to the cruelty that’s being done in their name in Vietnam — including the cruelty done to the young men who are being drafted and sent to fight and die and a pointless war. The poet finds himself in a vortex, that is, a whirlpool, from which he can neither find any bearing, nor escape.

Wikipedia tells us that “‘Sutra’ in Indian literary traditions refers to an aphorism or a collection of aphorisms in the form of a manual or, more broadly, a condensed manual or text.”

So if a ‘sutra’ is a collection of aphorisms, what, then, is an aphorism?

aphorism /ăf′ə-rĭz″əm/

noun

1. A tersely phrased statement of a truth or opinion; an adage. synonym: saying.

2. A brief statement of a scientific principle.

3. A comprehensive maxim or principle expressed in a few words; a sharply defined sentence relating to abstract truth rather than to practical matters.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

So Wichita Vortex Sutra is, literally (to the extent that Ginsberg ever really speaks literally), a collection of comprehensive maxims relating to abstract truth about the reality of the war in Vietnam (and by extension any such war) as seen from the vortex of ‘Heartland’ America (or any such place).

Ferlinghetti says, ‘If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times.’ Ginsberg is a poet and he clearly tries in all of his poetry to create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times.

In Ode to Billie Joe, at least, Bobby Gentry also rises to the challenge. (So too the Beatles with A Day in the Life.)

I am not a poet and I don’t aspire to be. But I am a writer, and we are in apocalyptic times.

I’ll see what I can do.

1. Harry Seebode, of Little Falls.

2. Turns out that it was the flu, not covid. Whatever. It was nasty.