Free The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

benches, on certain park benches where tourists didn’t pass near, on a traffic island right below our French windows and our slender balconies…. One must become oblivious to the misery of others, or be destroyed by it; or do something about it! But when all alternatives, all courses of action, are impossible? What good is knowledge, without power? Can we put on “power” with “knowledge,” to reverse Yeats’ question? We have a great deal of knowledge, many of us—and so what? The impotence of the intellectual translates itself into fashionable irony, chic irony, which is deathly—true obscenity, in fact. Knowledge should not lead to that kind of death of the spirit. And yet—hasn’t this been the special lesson of our time, haven’t the Left’s intellectuals learned that very well, that any proposals they make, any candidates they espouse, will surely be rejected by the majority of voters? So much for the alliance of the masses and the intellectuals! But there are other connections, other pathways; and the external world, which is called “history,” is probably not the world.
     
    No, at these crucial times, the dream-life did help me; it certainly helped me in England. Meeting John and Joan Gardner, Bob and Pili Coover, Stanley Elkin and his long-suffering wife, * whom I did not get to know very well: at the very nadir of my psychological life, the closest to depression I have ever been, damaged by the deaths back home (one in July, and we left for England about six weeks later…) which I had no idea how to deal with, how to mourn, and then the astonishing trouble with A.K. (who demanded I write a favorable review of his pathetic novel, and send it to John Leonard at the New York Times Book Review !), who was living right in London at that time, and evidently far more emotionally disturbed than Ray and I had had the imagination to know…and the uprootedness, the bustle and noises and apparent pointlessness of all that activity on Oxford Street and Park Lane…not to mention the frankly stupid materialism ofMayfair, the ugly moronic trash for sale on Curzon Street and in the Audley Street galleries, golden bathtubs, marble bathtubs, statues, vases, candlesticks, overpriced gourmet food, trash trash expensive trash!—and more of it, everywhere, in that part of London—no matter that elsewhere people are starving, elsewhere meaning not India or Africa but in the very doorways of the elegant shops and boutiques, the vagrants with their pathetic bundles and paper bags hiding wine bottles…. We didn’t know at the time how very much we disliked Mayfair, and what a strain it was to always seem so admiring of this part of England, so courteous, well-mannered, determined not to be critical or boorish Americans…the relief, then, of moving to Kings Road and a corner of Belgravia bordering on Chelsea, still expensive but at least human, and the life there of another quality altogether…. The dreams I had then were helpful, in some way I didn’t know; I couldn’t remember them when I woke except to sense that they were restorative, therapeutic, restful—a balance to the strain of consciousness, so very necessary. So the psyche is its own therapist. To a certain extent. They say that beyond a point of endurance the psyche will break down, and dreams will mirror daylight reality—no escape from it, then, no distancing—and one is liable to terrible psychological trouble, the sluggishness of depression being the least of it. In such troughs of the spirit one commits suicide, I suppose. So if drugs or alcohol damage sleep, thereby damaging dreams, they guide the helpless individual toward death—toward his own suicide—if his conscious life is disturbing…. People don’t know this, or don’t care?…or are most people quietly suicidal, without admitting it?
     
    The doctor who prescribed barbiturates for me, when I couldn’t sleep, a few years ago: really a criminal. Enormous dosage, so powerful I could