Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

PREFACE

If we could live inside one another's heads for a single day, for even a single hour, so much would become clear—so many puzzling differences, so many ostensible reasons for "estrangement," would vanish. Are we not, each of us, the center of the universe?—yet we were born into a culture that assumes that some people are the center, some few individuals are absolute, and their decrees, their beliefs, their ways of life must be accepted by all, no matter how destructive they are. Theere are cultures in which divinity is spread out evenly, energizing everyone and everything; there are other cultures—unfortunately, ours is one of them—in which the concept of "divinity" was snatched up by a political/economic order, and the democratic essence of divinity denied.

Though it has been denied, this essence of divinity has not been destroyed, and we are witnessing in our time its re-emergence, its evolution back into consciousness. Already we have had terrible psychic upsets, breaks between generations, heroic struggles wrongly called "rebellious acts," and, most tragic of all, casualties among those who sense that their society is an unhealthy one but who have no idea of how to transcend it, how to create a counter-magic to negate it. We have experienced countless manifestations of the struggle I believe to be common to most young Americans today: the attempt to rescue spiritual values from a society constantly in the process of devaluing itself.

I know from personal experience, as a writer, that a barrier of some kind does exist between one way of thinking and another, one "consciousness" and another. Yet it is intangible, inexplicable. Stories of mine like "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" and "Happy Onion" and "Boy and Girl" have been constantly misunderstood by one generation, and intuitively understood by another. A large number of readers seem to see in such stories morbidity, absurdity, and a sense that life is meaningless; younger readers—who write to me, or whom I meet while visiting college campuses—seem to understand that these stories deal with human beings struggling heroically to define personal identity in the face of incredible opposition, even in the face of death itself. (And I believe a new, healthier, saner concept of the experience of death is also evolving in our time.) Where some adult readers see ugliness, because they call "ugly" anything that offends a certain fixed concept of morality, other readers may see a kind of beauty. A new morality is emerging in America, in fact on the North American continent generally, which may appear to be opposed to the old but which is in fact a higher form of the old—the democratization of the spirit, the experiencing of life as meaningful in itself, without divisions into "good" or "bad," "beautiful" or "ugly," "moral" or "immoral."

What seemed to be dead—the world-matter surrounding us—has been discovered to be living, intensely alive. What seemed to be dead—the concept of "God"—is waking up, returning to consciousness. Because we are living in transformational years, our lives cannot be eventless. Some of us will be very frustrated, some of us will survive beautifully; some of us—perhaps the very youngest—will experience the turmoil as if it were quite natural and the acceleration of change in our time nothing extraordinary.

The stories in this collection are all realistic, and the mode in which I write is, if it must be given a name, that of psychological realism. Some tend toward the symbolic, but they are also realistic. "Year of Wonders," which concludes the volume, is set largely upon one of those centers of the universe a mystic knows to be a "Mandala," though most people see it as a shopping plaza by an expressway. Is one vision correct, and the other incorrect? Does the mystic know something the realist can't quite express? But the visions are not antithetical, they are complementary. Both are required. We come by both naturally, and should not reject one in favor of the other.