Robin Magowan
NANCY LING: The California Dream
It's one thing to squat on some lonely stone praying our–
selves into the future void, but can't we just find that She, pop that
pill, have it all now and forever? All over the American sky are these
signs, "Fly now, pay later." Little wonder, then, if one or two of us
impatient types indulge, grab that heavy muse with the weird SLA
bumper sticker, feeling this time at least we've got it solved. While
we lie drinking it all in and the typewriter purrs back and forth, back
and forth, no hand but Hers apparently guiding it over the marathon
miles, visions come of what freedom itself might mean: an end to
this obsessive typing; a new brotherhood; even political life, a name
turned to running a foundation if not the country. "Better me than
someone else," we'd say and sit there, hugging the piles of papers
and beaming into the photographic beyond . But that pretty chick
with the shoulder-length hair on your local front page is not called
Death-in-Life for nothing; nor is the Orphic Descent any substitute
for the Mystic Fire. Try, however, to talk about that and the damnd–
est hell breaks loose-kidnappers, parents, grand juries, FBI-I had
seen that Lady naked in her Closet and, between them, they were
going
to
make me pay .
But in those days I was ambitious, and hardly a week passed that
didn't find me like Don Quixote getting out my VW to quest for
this Keatsian Lady of the Lake, all blue notes in a raven field. Mean–
while my circumstances had reached a point that found me at 35,
both fired for a second time by the Berkeley English department-a
local record-and divorced by my second wife. Instead of getting
out, I remained-caught up in the niceties of Bay Area life and the
biweekly visits with my children. I wanted to write and my Boynton
