Blog

BY JON FERGUSON

REVIEWED BY M.C. GARDNER

Jon Ferguson’s The Anthropologist is splendid  anthropology and a masterful follow up to Farley’s Jewel. In Jewel Ferguson’s Professor Larry Farley was in search of Being.  More prosaically, Ferguson’s Anthropologist, Professor Leonard Fuller is in search of Leonard Fuller:

He wants to go back to the beginning, to the first moment Leonard Fuller remembers being Leonard Fuller… He doesn’t know what it was. Was it a what or was it a when? Do all whens become whats as soon as the moment passes? Are there no whens? Is temporality one of man’s lamer inventions? Is When I was a kid always What I remember about being a kid?

Farley, Fuller, and Ferguson are aging ‘boomers.’ They are each aware of their palpable decline and have the good sense not to morn their losses:

Fuller noticed that eye contact and age were inversely proportional: the older you became the less people looked at you… He knew his body was no longer appetizing…. he was certain, couldn’t stand up to other bodies she could find on the market. He was old meat; the expiation date on his label had expired…

As does the author, Fuller enjoys music:

He has a shelf full of records that he bought during and shortly after his college years and since he has been living alone they are his principal company. As he puts it, “I have a shit load of great friends and they only talk when I want to listen.”

Fuller lost his 2nd wife in traffic accident:

They, wife and minivan, hit a tree – a tree hit them – one night while they were coming home from her aerobics class. A patch of ice was deemed responsible for bringing the three together. So the police said, anyway. Fuller had been devastated at the moment, but later realized that maybe people over fifty are better off living alone.

With his first wife he sired twin daughters. She left him for a psychiatrist with whom she had an affair.

Fuller couldn’t have been happier. His wife had somebody to talk to and the psychiatrist had somebody to screw. Every now and then it was the other way around. So Dolores said anyway.

Leonard Fuller is reminiscent of Joseph Heller’s Bob Slocum. Both regard their lives and the world through an ironic glass, darkly. The Anthropologist is Ferguson’s 2^nd novel in English. Something Happened was Heller’s long awaited follow up to Catch 22. Slocum and Fuller are at times painfully cynical–but never less than acutely honest:

Everything’s already been said, but since nobody listens, it doesn’t hurt to repeat things from time to time…

Fuller’s Anthropology is his minor hope for his students. In the very least he might make one or two question the unquestioned superiority of their own culture:

the only way Americans would stop thinking they were the center of the universe was by showing them from a very small age that their culture and values were but one possibility in a vast multi-colored world.

Beyond this he knows that teaching is a fool’s errand. He is happy to award an A+ to any student who has the temerity to simply complete his assignments. Teaching is not the challenge it once was. Looking for engagement of any type he discovers something between his sheets that ought not to be there…

He smelled nothing unusual but he did find a strange foot-long reddish-brown hair near the pillow on the side of the bed he didn’t sleep on…. He hadn’t had anybody in that bed for months. And the last person, Sarah Fletcher, a student from years before who was now a divorced graduate assistant, had short blond locks.

The anthropologist Leonard Fuller now becomes Detective Leonard Fuller. His secretary, Sharon Juppit becomes his Dr. Watson or perhaps, “his girl Friday.” The mystery of the mysterious red head and her adventures in Fuller’s bed provides the first of two narrative threads that wind their way through the maze of the Anthropologist’s many musings.

Sharon is the most likable character in the book and grounds the ethereal Fuller to the terra firm of the campus quad.

She was sixty-four years old, weighed way more than a tenth of a ton, looked to be descended from every shade of chimpanzee (as Fuller once said to her when she asked him what to put down on an application form under RACE, “Look Sharon, figure it this way: your mother and father each had two parents who each had two parents who each had two parents…and we’re only back to 1850. Try going back about ninety million years – and that’s a low number. Good luck on trying to figure out what race you are…. After Sharon had worked in the the Anthropology Department for a few years, Fuller asked:

“So Sharon, who’s the finest professor on campus?”

“You are.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because you’re the only one who knows how full of shit he is.”)

That knowledge frees Fuller to occasionally celebrate the heroes of his chosen discipline:

Mircea Eliade was a wonderful man… I had the pleasure of taking a class from him in Chicago before he retired… He says we all have things that are sacred to us and other things that are profane, that is, that are not sacred. What is sacred for one person can be profane for another and vice versa. What is sacred for one culture is profane for another… For some of you, it might be the label on your jeans. The ‘Tommy Whatever-his-name-is” brand might be the only one you’ll wear. Or maybe it’s Calvin Klein or Reebok or Nike. In any case, those jeans have special meaning to you. Not only the jeans, but how you wear them – low, below your underpants. Maybe your underpants are sacred too. You know something is sacred for you if you wonder where you’d be without it. Without your jeans would your self-image suffer? Would you feel you were a lost sheep? Would you feel less than whole…

So what does all this mean… to be human is to have a sacred side. Eliade found it everywhere he looked. To understand this is to begin to understand other cultures and other civilizations. Look at what is sacred. Respect it. Don’t think only your culture is special….

People will give their lives when what is sacred to them is being threatened. Just look at the Middle East today. Look at all religious conflicts. Maybe if politicians understood what Eliade was saying, they would approach conflicts differently. Maybe they’d get to the real reason people tie dynamite around their waists…

Then as a grace note to the futility of his efforts he adds:

I suggest you all read Eliade’s book. It’s on your semester reading list. It’s short. And like I said, he didn’t complicate things. Next week we’ll have a look at Edmund Leach. Any questions?”

No questions.

His instruction to his daughters was delivered with as much dispassion:

They had no religious upbringing other than Fuller’s stories about what people believe all over the world. They got tastes of Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Shinto, Navajo, shamanism, Unitarianism, Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzschism, Capitalism, Walt Disneyism, and a few glimpses at local African and Polynesian metaphysical inklings. Fuller laid a few samples out on the table and neither girl wanted the whole meal.

The 2nd narrative strand concerns one of his secretary’s sons. Fuller confesses his egoism for never asking after him and then asks after him:

“Not bad. The kid that was in jail is out now on good behavior.

He’s back in Albuquerque with his girlfriend.”

                    “Which one was that?”

                    “Rufus, the oldest.”

                    “How could one of your kids end up in jail?”

                    “You’re the anthropologist…”

                    “As long as he’s not robbing liquor stores…”

“The problem is, the rap stars don’t need to rob the liquor stores, but kids like my son do so they can wear the white hats and fur coats, drive the shiny cars, catch the fast women… make that shiny women and fast cars. I don’t hear any politicians talking about that.”

The red hair and delinquent son are two pegs on which Ferguson hangs his plot. But the plot is not the point. Early in the novel he contemplates the use of memory. His girl friend had suggested that fish have a four second memory. A fish bowl is less boring for a fish if after four seconds it always appears new.

We all only remember what we remember. No matter who we are we don’t remember what we have forgotten.

In Farley’s Jewel, Ferguson had linguistically experimented with consciousness by invoking his mother’s Alzheimer’s. In The Anthropologist he plays with the instinctual similarities between man and fish:

But fish are born knowing how to swim. They have a memory that goes back to…back to…back to…just like we do…an instinctual memory…how to suck…how to chew…how to swallow…how to defecate…and then the cultural memory…the symbol…the flag…the word…the Tommy Hilfucker jeans…the star…the cross…the stop sign…the bowed head…blood…the Super Bowl…the Rose Bowl…the fish bowl…values…birth rituals…baptismals…school…mating rituals…death rituals…the collective memory that says this is sacred and that is profane.

And then, as if to belie the relativity of  Eliade’s dichotomy, Ferguson gives us a hint of his own feeling of the sacred in two beautiful meditations:

Is the four second memory a guarantee against suicide? If you forget everything after four seconds is there never enough time to decide that life is no longer worth living? Does a goldfish ever knowingly, willingly, leap out of its bowl…her bowl…his bowl…to put an end to this swimming, eating, defecating party? For it is a party to which no one is invited but everyone comes. Everyone we know of, that is. Leaving the party is another story. Hemingway wasn’t invited but he knew when to leave. With a four second memory he no doubt would have kept swimming up and down the cool rippled stream. But he remembered what it was like when he had whatever he knew he would never have again. Or maybe he didn’t want it anymore. Maybe he no longer wanted what he remembered having and could think of nothing new worth having. Maybe he had pain. Maybe the only new thing was pain and the memory of painlessness was such that pain had to go and the only way of kissing it goodbye was blowing the brains around the riverbank in Ketchem.

This first meditation on the author of For Whom the Bell Tolls is the precursor of a second  which I believe to be the heart of The Anthropologist. The Hemingway title is taken, of course, from Donne’s famous poem. We all know for whom the bell tolls. It is at the bell’s behest that we discover the common ground of our humanity At this juncture in the book Ferguson introduces us to a campus gardener, Juan José Carlos Rodriguez. Fuller often speaks to him on his way to and from class.

“I had intended to talk to you today about Edmund Leach, the famous English anthropologist… But as I was walking to campus this morning, I decided to talk about somebody else who, contrary to Leach, is never discussed in academic circles. His name is Juan José Carlos Rodriguez. He is a gardener here on campus. Yesterday he was planting pansies along the walkway outside the building you’re sitting in. I decided to talk about him instead of Sir Edmund Leach because he has been more of an influence on my thinking than Leach has. I don’t say this to diminish the importance of Leach, but to amplify the life of Juan José Carlos Rodriguez.

This is the beginning of the ‘Rodriquez Mediation.’ It appears at the beginning of chapter eight approximately midway through the book. Fuller will employ Rodriguez in the denouement of the mystery of the red hair in the book’s final pages. That denouement is a delightfully absurdist conclusion to a fine novel. I will leave it to the reader to discover it and the second half of the book on his own. It is as abundantly rich as the first and concerns itself with second narrative strand to which I earlier alluded. The ‘Rodriquez Mediation’ takes up the whole of chapter eight and is among the finest half dozen pages that the author has penned. Initially it is simply one man’s story. But no matter how simple the man no man’s story is simple. Rodriguez’s story is one of tragedy and strength–it is a tale of the earth by a tender of the soil. Fuller narrates it as it was narrated to him some twenty years before.  Its force and loveliness is one not diminished by time. In these xenophobic days it is always useful to remember that the enemy at our gate is also our neighbor. I can think of no finer encomium than concluding with Ferguson’s own prose at the conclusion to this pivotal chapter of a most remarkable novel.

The first reason I tell you about Juan José is to get you to respect the campus gardeners, most of whom have similar stories. When I was your age, a gardener was an invisible man. He was ‘a gardener’ and nothing more. He had no life attached to his gardening. I saw him outside of time like one sees the desk one is sitting at or the hamburger one eats at McDonald’s. One does not see or feel the tree that was chopped and the logger that chopped it and the factory workers that cut the wood or the designer who designed the desk and so on. One does not see the cow that was slaughtered to make the meat patty or the tomatoes that were harvested for the ketchup or the wheat that waved in the field to make the flour for the burger bun or the workers who picked the tomatoes or swept the floor in the bun factory. Every person you see and each thing you touch has a history, an infinitely complicated and unfathomable history. No one asked to be born in Juarez, Mexico into dirt poverty. No one asks to be born who they are and where they are born and into the circumstances they are born into. Nobody, not queens, not presidents, not ditch diggers, not priests, not prostitutes, not pretzel makers, not professors. Every creature on the face of the earth has their own story to tell. I ask you to respect that story. You don’t have to agree with it or like it, but at least respect it and understand its complexity.

The second reason I have told you about Juan José Carlos Rodriguez is so that when you study social sciences you should never forget that you are dealing with real people. Every statistic is made up of real people. Every cultural tradition is practiced by real people. Every belief is believed by real people. Every god that is talked about and every moral notion that is plastered on the planet comes out of the mouth of a human being. Every pair of shoes that are made, every meal that is cooked, every house that is built, every war that is fought, every kiss, every murder, every smile, every fart, every book that is written, every film that is made, every song that is sung, all this comes from people.

And now, what are people? What is a person? Anthropology is supposed to be the study of man, but what is a man? I ask you to respect man. I ask you to remember that the social sciences are about real human beings. But what are real human beings? Do I know? Do you know? Does a doctor know? Does a physicist know? Does an astronomer know? Does a biologist know? Does a chemist know? Does a priest know? Does the Pope know? Does a policeman know? Does a judge know? Does a psychiatrist know? A university president? A mother? A father? A senator? A terrorist? A drug dealer? A rap singer? An opera singer? Bob Dylan? Jennifer Lopez? Prince? Madonna? Michael Jackson? Michael Jordan? Bill Clinton? Dan Rather? Jay Leno? God? The Devil? The anthropologist? Edmund Leach? Juan José Carlos Rodriguez? Does anybody know what a human being really is?

My best guess is no. No, nobody really knows what a human being is.

Why do I guess no? Because if I can teach you one thing, if I can get you to think about one thing, it is to step back and try to get a perspective on everything you believe, every moral value you espouse (including the label on your jeans), everything you consider important and true, every goal you give to yourself and the world. Ask yourself where your ideas come from. Ask yourself why you believe what you believe. Look around you and what do you see? If you open your eyes you will see a lot of sheep with a lot of different colored fur. You will see American sheep. You will see French sheep. You will see Catholic sheep. You will see Jewish sheep. You will see leftist sheep, right wing sheep, Christian sheep, Islamic sheep, Buddhist sheep, atheistic sheep. You will see herbal healing sheep, sports sheep, cinematographic sheep. You will see journalistic sheep, literary sheep, television sheep, fashion sheep…and bhhaaa, bhhaaa, bhaaaa.

So what does this tell you? What does it tell you about human beings? What does it tell you about ANTHRO-pology? What answers does it give you? Does man have a soul as most religions would have us believe? Is man a materialistic machine as most scientists would have us believe? Is the truth somewhere in between as many compromisers would have us believe? Or is the truth somewhere way, way, outside? Has this dichotomy got it all wrong? Maybe there is neither soul nor matter. Maybe man is something very other.

And did man evolve? But evolution implies evolution toward something. Who can prove that man or the world or the universe is evolving toward something? And why is man the measure? Why does man judge everything from HIS point of view?

Do you know why? Because what the hell else can he do? So when he judges his own knowledge and intelligence it is always he who sets the rules. Maybe this is why he needs gods. To tell him if he is right or wrong. But if they are his gods he is right back where he started from, looking at himself in the mirror and babbling about men being this and men being that.

So when you walk out the door today look for a gardener. When you find one, you will see a man, a deep man, deeper than you or I will ever know.

Then look for the sheep, the colorful various sheep. Which color are you? Or are you a horse? Or a wild animal?

Thank you for attention. See you next week.”