The Indigenous Tribesmen of Neverland

Paperback: HiT MoteL Press, 2010, 1st Edtion
Ebook: HiT MoteL Press, 2011, 2nd Edition.
392 pages. Paperback ISBN 9780965584272

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See the other books in this sextet Hitmotel Press.

Summary

This novel is the second volume of the My Years of Apprenticeship at Love sextet which follows the main character Walker for about 20 years. It shows him back living the slacker life in Austin after heartbreak in Montreal and hard times making a living as a poet in Berkeley. You can read about Walker's adventures there editing an underground literary zine in the book The Punctual Actual Weekly.

Though he has a degree in Physics and has taught school, he now is doing knock around carpentry, trying to get on his feet after a marijuana bust on the farm. You can read about Walker's youthful follies in the trilogy Cultivating the Texas Twiser Hybrid, The Secret of the Cicadas Song and Knight of a 1000 eyes.This novel,The Indigenous Tribesmen of Neverland is the meditation of a hippie man turning 30. He lives in a house with Wild Bill a writer and life drawing model with 3 big dogs. Wild Bill is a little older 39, a physical-cultureist has a great long beard. Like ZZTop or CS Peirce or JC Maxwell. Or John Muir. And he is separating from his wife.
The story starts when Walker meets Laura a high school student on the University of Texas free shuttlebus. Thus begins their story of how they fall in love with each other, a sweetly passionate March-July romance.
Walker is growing pot on a roof deck outside his window in the big house he shares with Wild Bill. The mother of one of the high school girl friends of Laura, a tall string bean basket baller 14 year old hanging out with the boys in their Neverland time, turns out to be Wild Bill’s drug dealer. This is a good chapter about the roll of a marijuana in the growth of consciousness in the 1970s fiercely paranoid Texas, an oppressive paterfamilias state — the US spraying the herbicide paraquat on the Mexican marijuana fields so even though he is trying to recover from getting busted on the farm, he is a devotee of Marijane.
Laura introduces Wild Bill to another high school girl and we have a couple of couples, these older-guy writers, slackers with these bright young women finding their way. But that’s just the love and work angle.

Alive and Well in Austin.................................................1
A Shuttlebus Named IF ...............................................10
Dogmen Down on the River ......................................... 22
Like a Coyote in a Prairie Hail Storm............................. 30
Fugue in A Minor ........................................................41
A Good Cry for Green Spring.........................................53
Two On Pillows Dreaming.............................................64
Home on the Range....................................................70
Guarding Angels ........................................................83
Agent Felicity ........................................................... 89
The Night Auditor ......................................................99
Letter to a Campfire Girl............................................129
Tales of the Wild Seed Women ..................................136
Some Correspondence with Dick Ache ........................ 170
A Room of One’s Own................................................... 172
Austin Deep In the Wild Heart....................................... 183
In the Thirtieth Year of My Age..................................... 190
The Peter Pan Syndrome................................................ 193
Further Worry about the Situation ................................. 196
Good-bye Party .............................................................. 203
Heavy Metal Music at the Steel Works ......................... 209
Epilogue ......................................................................... 214
Appendix: A Structural Analysis
Introduction.................................................................... 217
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice ............................................ 219
A Toast to Carlos Castaneda ......................................... 235
The Theatre of the Tesseract (Intro)............................... 238
The Subliminal Kid (a monologue) ............................... 241
The Theatre of the Tesseract (Notes) ............................. 262
Quarking the Cube ........................................................ 285
And we are way downstream in the light ...................... 313

Writing Notes for The Indigenous Tribesmen of Neverland from the Author

I majored in physics in college, and even though I took graduate classes in group algebras and the vector space theory of matter, I did not go on to get a Ph.D. because I realized I was not of the right stuff. I graduated from UT Austin in 1972 and started drifting down the downward path to become a writer. Because I didn't have an advanced degree I could only teach and run labs in trade schools and junior colleges. I could work as a technician.
I see the word neotony could be well applied to this character. That is the work of the artist, the negative capability of working your way back from the evolutionary necessity to procreate and raise children back to the state of being like a child open and creative. Peter Pan syndrome is about trying to extend neotony, that state of being where the precepts are not all irreversibly set but still have the ability to be novel.
One main goal in my writing is to present a mind that is bridging the supposed gap between art and science. There is science that leads to a real appreciation of our presence here, and there is art and play in the field of ideas. It is a literary fiction based on ideas, like Sartre or Borges for example. It is a poetry of feelings, a psychological novel like the Beatniks. Hard sci-fi mutated into lyrical psy-fi (fidelity)? A great trope in this book is around the ideas of groups in mathematics and psychology and anthropology. There is at the end of this book a celebration of the Rubics cube, which does let you hold infinity in the palm of your hand.
I wanted to write about my life. I lived like a surfer committed to being available to ride the waves, but in my case a writer committed to being available to get into the flow of creativity. Consequently I was often unemployed or working some mind-numbing dead end job. Bukowski was helpful in showing me how to endure work.
Another main goal in writing The Indigenous Tribesmen of Neverland is to understand the kind of kinship among friends and family. Moreover I was a student of structuralism during my stint at the University of Texas in the early 70s when it was a reigning methodology of anthropology. The whole last third of the book is devoted to a Structural Analysis, as does a great hero writer at the time Carlos Castaneda got a phd in his own stuff, be it fiction of fact. He used great tropes of fiction, the older teaching the younger, the platonic dialog, in the service of psychedelia: something we were trying to figure out. I studied a lot of advanced mathematics in college and found myself looking for isomorphisms among the structure of Levi-Strauss’s mythology and kinship diagrams, the Sephiroth of Jewish Kabbalah, and the Lo Shu generator diagram of the I Ching hexagrams. I was doing an anthropology study of my owns tribesmen. The hippie men caught up in an extended stay in the childhood of Neverland. Why do men do this or try to. It is to remain ins a state of beginners mind. Fundamental for the creative artist.
Where was I going with this anthropology. One thing it does it get to the basis of religious belief. If these structures, of bringing the diachronic into reckoning with the synchronic is at the basis of all myth, indeed of all belief, we should feel ourselves liberated from the beliefs. Or at least see that they are all on equal footing, that your god is not above my god. Some of these ideas will get a much more extensive treatment in the 4th novel of the sextet: Seeing Through the Spell of Transference.

Images from within the book

The figure is titled The Signed Hand House of Chance and Love. It shows athe main arteries and environs of Austin and the river as world lines in the palm for consideration byh a reader. Themain job of a writer is to read and understand signs.

The figure istitled: Night Movies through the Semi-permeable Reception Sets of Dream Radio.
This starts to suggest the 'bookmovie' flow of the novel, which becomes more formal in a solo theatre piece titled The Subliminal Kid n and apppendix of the book.

Mythopoiesis as Echo Location through Dialogic Field of 4 elements

Walker puts his girlfriend in a wine label.

A theatre playbill for the solo theatre piece by Walker included in the appendix.

The figure shows a collage of fractals in space reproduced on the face of a tribal woman. It shows totems of the tribesmen as doors in a 4D space time cube in which some can shamanistically enter. It shows text as a diachronic and synchronic matrix or crossward puzzle an incantation for the the movement in 4 dimensional space.

The figure is titled The Tesseract as Generalized Model for Archetypal Mnemonic Mandals. It shows a isomorphisms between the Cabalistic Sephiroth and the Lo Shu diagram for the elemental hexegrams of the I Ching. And the great model of my from Levi-Strauss. On the left is a tesseract rotated or convoled to show the movement of the model of an object in 4 dimensional space.

The figure is titled The Monstrance of Forking Paths in a Separable Space. It shows a Rubic cube separated into the corner cube and the center cube. Above shows a teselated tesseract with a point missing so that one can escape it and be not contained by it.