3 Sections by Vijay Seshadri

Author:Vijay Seshadri
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-345-2
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

It had been a while since the years of revolution, but the talk was still all about liberation—not credible negative liberation from, say, privation, tyranny, censorship, and abduction by night, but big American liberation, positive, material and spiritual, paradoxical and unimaginable, crowded around with myths and poems and shot through with a seductive incoherence. Large sections of society were experimenting. Cults multiplied, with some bad consequences. Therapies multiplied. Flying saucers carried people away. Some people were being born again, others were seeing the end of the world. The new music was being made by the Sex Pistols and Devo, and that music was disaffected and conceptual, but in the rural Northwest people were still listening to the old music, which promised freedom. Freedom this and that. Freedom from sexual repression, social norms, war, crude oil, pollution. I was a free man in Paris. It’s knowing that your door is always open and your path is free to walk. So take a good look at my face. Freedom’s just another word. There is a town in North Ontario. If you want to know what it is to be free, you have to spend the day in bed with me.

I’d been hovering around these ideas for as long as I’d known about them. With their glamour and history, they offered camouflage for the endless vacation I was taking from my circumstances and my identity in my late adolescence and early and mid-twenties. Through my partiality to the ideas, I became attached to salmon fishermen. I’d managed to convince myself that only salmon fishermen were liberated from expectations external to themselves. Through my attachment to salmon fishermen, I wound up in late October of 1981 getting more seasick than I’d ever been, so seasick that to this day whenever I’m on or near a commercial dock and smell, however faint it is, that odor characteristic to fishing boats—a perfume synthesized from the fumes of diesel fuel, hydraulic fluid, iodine, and overripe fish—my gorge rises in affliction. I was so seasick then that not long afterward I decided to swear off the ocean forever, except as something to look at and take an occasional dip in.

Fishermen didn’t like the Russians, and they were unenthusiastic about other nationalities—Poles, Taiwanese, Koreans, Norwegians—who fished off the Northwest coast. They did, though, admire the Japanese, irrationally (because when it came to practices in American waters that could be interpreted as offensive to American hospitality the Japanese probably weren’t any better or worse than anyone else) and almost without qualification. The Japanese were on a roll in those days, in themselves and in the way they were perceived. They had a nice aura. They weren’t the defeated nation of the Second World War, and they weren’t the inscrutable threat to American economic supremacy that they became in the nineteen-eighties. They were disciplined, intelligent, hardworking pacifists who made excellent, inexpensive products. They were modest and hardy and expert. Knowledge of their profound civilization had penetrated far into the country. People

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