The Unsubdued Forest

By Lewis E. Birdseye

Dr. Donald Michaelson knows it is impossible to exist for any length of time without wondering whether life is worth living at all. For five years, he has watched the eyes of his students glaze over with boredom as he lectures about beauty, truth, and justice. But now he has just taught his last English class at Bluestone University, the victim of a forced resignation. He decides on suicide as the means to end his pain and confusiononly to find that self-inflicted death is neither an easy nor satisfactory way to end his problems.

As he attempts to make his way off campus for the last time, he is recruited by a student dissident to speak in front of hundreds, causing a chain of unpredictable events that leaves Donald horizontal and bleeding, with a lust-driven coed on top of him.

Confused and unhappy he is still breathing, Donald begins searching for the perfect way to end his life. In order to achieve his goal, Donald must travel a curious road filled with obstacles and absurdities that include a group of anarchists, a seismologist more interested in measuring her sexual prowess than in determining the power of earthquakes, the ghost of a long-dead Confederate soldier, and figures from his dreams.

The Unsubdued Forest shares one mans tragic yet curiously comedic quest to seek a simple death that ultimately leads him down a path where life-changing answers await.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jun 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781480800656

Lewis E. Birdseye

Lewis E. Birdseye earned a PhD from Columbia and has been an educator for much of his life. In addition, he has worked as a high-rise construction worker, a professional river guide on the Chatooga River, has run fifteen marathons and several ultra marathons, and has toured by bicycle much of Europe—from above the Arctic Circle in Norway to the islands of the Aegean Sea. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, with his hospitalist wife, and together they tend to their organic garden. He is the author of five works of fiction: Vastation, The Unsubdued Forest, In My Beginning, The Gate of Ivory, and The Gate of Horn. His lifelong wish has been to be a poet or a river otter living on a wild and scenic river far from the madding crowd.

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Copyright © 2013 Lewis E. Birdseye, III.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-0066-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0064-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0065-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013906637

Archway Publishing rev. date: 6/10/2013

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Tree.psd

Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.

—Henry James, Sr. Substance and Shadow, 1863

When the wolf howls, we hear ourselves.

Inuit saying

Introduction

THE UNSUBDUED FOREST is in no way intended to be any kind of existential statement. It is a novel, a humorous one, I believe.

It presents a character who does in fact question the value of his life, life in general, but he is no Meursault, nothing like Job, has clearly read Camus and Sartre, but is too much himself — in some ways perhaps not unlike you, certainly not unlike me — to be regarded as a philosophical savant, idiot or otherwise. He is a man caught in a net, no Agamemnon to be sure, nor an actor in a tragedy of enduring fascination to us ordinary humans. Our lives merely present to us a long series of nagging problems, the total weight of which bends us nearly to the breaking point but rarely does little more than make us relish with more delight the bright moments life accommodates us with on occasion, the carrot that keeps us moving forward, so to speak.

No, Donald Michaelson is me I suppose, if not you, and like so many people I have known. He’s not a bad fellow, but do him the favor of not looking into his life too deeply. He certainly, up to the point where his story begins, hasn’t done this, nor had the events of the story not occurred might ever have done so. And he can’t really be faulted for this. If we did in fact look deeply into ourselves, what might we see peering back at us? Is a glimpse of that rough beast, an awareness of its residence within us, worth the discomfort such knowledge is quite likely to cause us? I leave that for you to decide. In any case, Donald Michaelson is one of those rare and unfortunate individuals who is forced to make such a discovery; life intrudes rudely, one might say, and he is changed. Is he a better man for his experience? Sadder, but wiser? Just sad? Wise? I don’t know. I do know he isn’t very different at the end of his adventure, but the difference, minor, petty, barely noticeable even to him, is worth noting. It makes me like him even more, and I mean like in its two most common meanings.

—Lewis Birdseye,

Eugene, Oregon 2013

Chapter One

"Not a single one of us would ever board an airplane if we knew it had been designed deliberately to crash sooner or later in such a way that no one on board could survive. Common sense tells us to avoid the ship that contains the fatal flaw that will plunge it beneath the waves, killing all its passengers. Would we, then, willingly embark on the journey of life had we the knowledge beforehand that the inevitable consequence of this journey is death?

"Life begins in ignorance, of course, which is why we tolerate it for so long, enjoy it even; but eventually there must come to even the most dull, the least inquisitive, the most content, some moment of awareness, a precipitate of intuition, or a confluence of events, that leaves one — like the passenger in the spinning plane or foundering ship — defenseless before the inexorable reality of death. The hypothetical passenger has then the good fortune to die, to have his consciousness snuffed out, before he can begin the torment of questioning — why me? why now? why ever? — though it may be assumed that the fear and shock of facing death are no more than a compacted version of the existential question why and that the passenger does in fact die like the rest of us, his torment differing only in degree, not in kind."

Maintaining a composure as solemn as engraved stone, Dr. Donald Michaelson with these words brought to a close the last class he would ever teach at Bluestone University. For five years he had watched the eyes of his students glaze over with disinterest and boredom as he had spoken of things that mattered, he then believed, deeply to him: beauty and truth and justice, the ideals that every young and naive English Instructor talks to his students about. Poetry and prose had been the subject for these discussions. The works of the great Romantic writers — Shelley, Keats, Byron — and his love for their words and his belief that they shed some mystical and purifying light on life had invigorated his lectures and made him, he later realized, a figure of fun for the students and an oddment for the older, tenured faculty who, in spite of their grand pretensions and learned seriousness, taught for the same reason the auto worker turns the allotted number of bolts per day in his assembly line, to pay the bills, to put food on the table.

Hands shot into the air and pert coeds, momentarily disturbed by his words, cooed at Dr. Michaelson, their down-turned lips signaling the kind of distress a fresh application of blush would cure. Without a glance at the class, however, Donald Michaelson picked up the books and papers scattered on the lectern before him and with what he hoped would appear to be some gesture of finality, a kind of parting flourish, swept them into his brief case. He had wanted his words to mean something, each of his gestures to be telling, and the tale he wished told was that life is inordinately unfair. Only a few weeks earlier he had found out how unfair it could be.

On one of those days when one feels that nothing can go wrong because the air is so clear and clean, the leaves on the trees so sharply defined that all the shades of green, from emerald to an almost pale yellow, can be seen, almost felt, when the grass is so heavily drenched with dew in the morning, the sun, its rays sharp and intense, like knives in the eye, opening new passages for sight, when it is, as it is so rarely, a joy simply to be alive — on such a day, on his way to his first class, he had found a note in his mail box written on department letterhead, a terse, See me, signed by Paul Sharpe, the Chair of the English Department. Donald had been hired by Paul, and in the five years he had taught at Bluestone had come to regard him as a good, if not close, friend, one whose judgment he could trust and in whom he could confide on matters in and out of the department. Without a thought as to what the note might mean, he had gone to Paul’s office after the class, still a bit excited over a point he’d made, more pleased, really, that he could still find satisfaction in his ideas than in the idea itself.

Looking forward to chatting with Paul, he had knocked on his office door, a bit puzzled that the one door in the department that always stood open was closed. The solemn voice that bade him enter should have signaled a warning to Donald, but unthinkingly he opened the door, a smile on his face in anticipation of the pleasant conversation to come. What he saw when he entered chilled and wrenched him as thoroughly as if a frozen hand had grabbed and twisted his gut. Paul was at his desk, erect, unsmiling, his eyes carefully averted from Donald’s. To his right sat Tom McHaney, Donald’s closest friend in the department. He appeared uncomfortable, stiff and awkward in his chair. The smile he greeted Donald with was lopsided, all on the right side of his mouth. A nervous tic pulled at the left corner of his mouth. He too kept his eyes averted. Before a word was spoken, Donald knew what the meeting meant.

It was mercifully short, Donald reflected later, as all good executions should be. The department, he was told tonelessly, had lost confidence in his work, felt it hadn’t reached the level expected of instructors at Bluestone University. The reference was of course to the pathetically few articles he had thus far published, not his teaching, which in the course of the short monologue was not mentioned at all. As Paul spoke, he appeared to be looking at Donald, though the point on which his eyes were focused was about a foot above his head and at least ten feet behind him. There was also the matter of his recent and unfortunate connection with certain campus dissidents, young student radicals who had the temerity to challenge long-standing traditions at Bluestone, and whose activity, even presence, on campus was deeply resented by all who valued, as Paul put it, the integrity, the proper passive objectivity of the academic way of life. At this Tom flashed Donald a brief I-told-you-so look, a pursing of lips and a sorrowful shaking of his head. His eyes were focused on Donald’s right shoulder. Donald would be notified in writing of the decision the department had already reached, but Paul felt it his duty as a colleague and as a friend — a brief and patently false smile slipped across his face like a lizard darting for cover — to talk to Donald personally. A hand was automatically extended and Donald stared at it blankly for a second until he realized it was Paul’s and he was expected to shake it and that the meeting was over.

In such a manner, coldly, impersonally, had Donald’s career at Bluestone University come, in effect, to an end. Now, with his last class of the spring semester completed, the finality of it all struck him hard. He had carefully chosen the words of his last lecture, had spent more time on his valedictory than on any other lecture he had ever given. He was, however, quite sure his words had missed the mark again, had merely teased his students into thinking, the kind of thought, like the proverbial Chinese meal, that leaves you feeling as empty as you were before the first bite of it had been taken. They’d taken his words much too docilely. A few hands waved in the air wasn’t the reaction he had hoped for, though what he’d expected he couldn’t have said. A minor feu de joie, he and his students going up in flames together to mark their outrage at life? A march on the administration building, with students, their ranks swelling as word spread of the injustice done to Donald, demanding his reinstatement, promotion, rather, to chairman, dean, provost, president? He almost smiled at his conceit.

He was the first one out the door, and when he entered the hall he accelerated his pace, almost running, to avoid any last encounters with his students. He had said to them all that he knew the best way that he could. There was nothing more for him to do at Bluestone.

As he left the building, a tall, thin young man dressed in a tan army field jacket called to him from the far side of the quadrangle, a half acre grove of Magnolia trees and azalea bushes graced with a quaint marble-domed structure at its center whose supporting pillars were engraved with the names of the illustrious Confederate Bluestone students who had perished at the hands of perfidious Yankees in the only war that would ever matter in the South. Donald’s first impulse was to pretend he hadn’t heard and keep walking, but the young man was persistent, calling to him again as he trotted over to greet him. He fell into step with Donald, breathing hard from his short run.

It’s all set, he panted. Everybody’s there. The fuckers are going to get it this time, no shit.

Donald shook his head distractedly, confused by what he was hearing. The morning had been entirely too stressful for him, and all he wanted now was to leave campus, to be as far from Bluestone as he could get.

When you tell them how those bastards screwed you over, man, we can get them to really listen. This could be the start of some really good things at Bluestone.

Slowly the words began to make sense. The young man walking beside him was the leader of the student dissidents Paul had accused Donald of supporting. He had been a name in one of Donald’s classes, a barely recognizable face, until one day he had mentioned that Shelley seemed of all the Romantic poets the only one whose relatively youthful death could be regarded as a real tragedy. Not because of his poetry, he was quick to add, but because he advocated social reform, perhaps real out-in-the-streets revolution.

He had quoted The Masque of Anarchy, which called for the men of England in 1819 to rise like lions, to shake their chains to earth, and which contains the ominous warning, You are many, they — the oppressors — are few. Each day thereafter the student, whose name was Ted Moschner, had managed to divert the class away from considerations of poetic forms, Donald’s speciality, to matters of social and political concern, switching the focus of the students from prosody to the conditions of the oppressed peasantry in the provinces of Mexico, or to the strategy of the Sendero Luminoso in Peru, the FARC in Colombia, even al-Qaeda in the Mid-East. Donald had argued that the greatest enemy of mankind is formlessness, that the very word for form, Forma in Latin, means beauty as well as shape or form. Without form there is chaos, the unthinkable absence of containment, of categories, of boundaries, of the powerful forces, forms in other words, that shape and control meaning. To these words Ted Moschner’s reply had been a single word, Bullshit. Donald had been horrified to hear his students applaud so crude a rejection of the only part of his beliefs that could have been called a faith.

In the weeks that followed Donald had come to anticipate, with an odd sense of anarchic pleasure that he couldn’t fully explain to himself, the moments when the boy would speak. Ordinarily slumped in his chair as if asleep, or dead, but always apparently listening carefully, the young man would suddenly straighten himself, his eyes opening wide, a look of mild surprise on his face, as if he were seeing the classroom for the first time. Foregoing the formality of raising his hand, he would then speak out on some point he felt the class needed to know lest by means of Donald’s lecture they might leave behind them that dreary world where so much suffering is to be found.

Initially Donald had resented the boy’s interruptions, especially when he sensed the students’ preference for what the young radical had to say. It took the boy’s absence one day near the end of the semester to make him realize, however, how much he himself had begun to look forward to Ted’s comments; and how much he had learned from him. From that time began their relationship, not a friendship, but a closeness based on an appreciation felt by each for what the other had. For all his apparent contempt for what Donald valued, Ted secretly, perhaps unconsciously, Donald began to believe, longed for the elegance, the aesthetic purity, the perfected uncontentiousness of the world of art, where alone beauty is truth. By contrast Donald found the hostile, angry world Ted described with such vigor fascinating, and he envied the total, irresolvable commitment changing it called for. At Ted’s urging he had begun to attend meetings of the World’s Rights Organization, a student association regarded by most of the faculty as dangerously subversive.

It was to a meeting of this organization that Ted was directing Donald. It had been called for the sole purpose of exposing the injustice of the tenure system at Bluestone. Donald would present his side of his dismissal in support of the WRO’s contention that Bluestone was part of a system that had no regard for the working man’s right to speak out against injustice.

Unthinkingly, weeks before, Donald had agreed to speak. In the intervening time, however, he had completely forgotten the promise he’d never fully intended to keep. The affect Donald’s word’s would have was what Ted was talking about, but Donald barely heard what was being said. He slowed his pace and turned his head to look more closely at the young man who kept talking animatedly about the improvements that would occur at Bluestone once the reactionaries, as he called those who had fired Donald, had been removed. He stared in wonder at the change that had occurred in Ted. Walking beside him, deep in a monologue he punctuated with vigorous movements of his hands, was, had he been a picture in GQ, something that would have been labeled radical chic. Beneath his carefully pressed field jacket, a Viet Nam era model, but clearly never worn, Ted was wearing a fawn-colored silk shirt neatly tucked into his beige Dockers. On his feet he wore a pair of artfully unpolished Italian loafers. Donald shook his head.

In one of their earliest conversations Ted had told Donald the origin of his name, the peroration of a discussion on fascism. Donald had been clever and learned in their talk, playing with words really. He had explained that the Latin fasces was a bundle of sticks with an axe protruding from one end used as a symbol of authority, and referred properly speaking to a system of economics in which a strong nationalistic government exercises control over industry, commerce, and finance. But he had quickly yielded to Ted when the young man had said quietly, Cut the academic crap.

Simply and tellingly he had illustrated fascism with the history of his name. His grandfather had been a well-known and respected Jewish doctor in Warsaw before the Second World War. His passion had been the violin, and his delight a beautifully crafted Guarneri he had found and bought in his student days in Rome. He had tended to it religiously, polishing it carefully after playing it, which he did for at least five hours every day. The old man had perished in a Nazi death camp, but he had really died the day the fascists had broken into his house, smashed his Jew violin, and scattered his family, to be exterminated like vermin in gas chambers, across the face of Eastern Europe. The final indignity had been the name given to the family before they were separated, Moszna, which in Polish means scrotum. The young lieutenant who had given them the name, and who had written it in precise gothic script on the forms designating the various places where they would die, had only commented on the difficulty of naming properly what he called The Jewish animals.

The details of the story were so vivid Donald could imagine the number of times Ted must have heard it as a boy, told by his father, who alone of his family had survived. The sick and broken survivor had changed his name yet again when he had come to the United States, to Johnson, a safe, neutral name he hoped would never draw attention to himself or to his son.

When he was sixteen, Ted had deliberately changed his name to Moschner, a more pronounceable variant of the name that kept his hatred of injustice alive, and he bore it now, not proudly, but defiantly and would continue to bear it, he stated with all the passion of committed youth, until there were no more fascists. It wasn’t to economics that the word fascist properly referred, Ted stated that day, but to anyone who sought power to do evil in the name of whatever god or doctrine he claimed for justification. A fascist was anyone who reduced another human being to helplessness, eventually to hopelessness. Systems that required bosses for example, and the bosses, too, were fascist. Donald was proof of that, having had his job stolen from him, and having had no choice but to accept an action he couldn’t resist or overturn. These words had persuaded Donald to speak to the W.R.O. But the young man who had spoken so eloquently to Donald on that day had looked like a young Castro or Che Guevara, bearded, dressed in fatigues, unwashed, conspicuously unkempt. Donald smiled inwardly as he glanced at Ted striding beside him, smiled wryly at the subtle influence he had exerted on the young man. He wasn’t at all sure the changes he saw were in Ted’s best interest.

In contrast to the young man, Donald was dressed in the safe and conservative uniform of the professional academic: a Harris Tweed jacket over an unironed blue, denim-like shirt, what might have been taken for a work shirt but for the fact that it was made of fine Oxford cloth. His tan slacks were complemented nicely by a pair of scruffy Clark desert boots. On his rather tall, angular frame his clothes tended to hang a bit, giving him the perfect look of nonchalant unkemptness sought after by all college instructors. His thick brown hair was fashionably long, and though he hated it flopping over his glasses when he walked, it would have been unthinkable for him to cut it. Secretly he thought of himself as looking distinctly Byronic, even on occasion limping slightly to emulate the poet’s club-footed gait. Though he pretended never to notice, it pleased him inordinately to hear pert little coeds, when he entered the classroom for the first day of class, always dramatically late, giggle to each other, Oooh, he’s so cute. Today all he had on his mind, however, was flight. Unconsciously he pushed his hair from his forehead and looked again at Ted, trying to grasp what the young man was saying.

The meeting was to be held at South Field, a small natural amphitheatre the college had enhanced by adding tiers of wooden seats on the sloping hillside at one end. University theatricals were staged there as well as pep rallies. Over the years, it had become the preferred meeting place for students who, for whatever reasons, chose to defy or wished to disrupt the school. Still only half listening to Ted, Donald heard the young man say that several hundred students were expected to be there. By this time they had come to the gate at the end of the quadrangle. Donald stopped suddenly, grabbing the gatepost with one hand as if for support.

Hundreds of people, you say? That’s impossible. I don’t know that many people on campus, and certainly that many don’t know me. I agreed to talk to a few of your friends, ten or at most twenty, I assumed. What in hell have you done? Donald spoke querulously, his voice rising in anger, but before he could continue, Ted interrupted.

You’re part of a process now, don’t you see? And if the process is to continue, as it must, then it has to attract people. Numbers matter. We’ve advertised this all over campus for about a month. I didn’t talk to you about it because I thought you knew and approved. I even saw you reading one of the notices before class about two weeks ago. I asked you what you thought about it, and you said it promised to be interesting.

Sickeningly, Donald remembered. He had indeed read a crudely printed handout he’d found on a desk in one of his classrooms. It had been filled with revolutionary rhetoric, vague threats, and even vaguer promises of redress for wrongs that had more to do with the nature of life than with man’s way of ordering his own. It had mentioned Dr. X, a learned professor, who would address a meeting of the WRO. Donald hadn’t bothered to register the time or place of the meeting in his consciousness and had only casually noted that Dr. X planned to speak on the nature of oppression under fascism. Donald had never connected Dr. X with himself. He couldn’t even do it now.

Why didn’t you use my name? Donald asked. I didn’t even realize that paper referred to me. Again Ted cut him off, but this time mercifully. No sooner had Donald spoken than he realized why X had been substituted for Michaelson. No one would have bothered to come had it been known that Donald was going to speak, no more, at any rate, than the ten or so people he had expected to address.

Don’t worry, were Ted’s words of encouragement. I’m going to speak first. All you’ll have to do is say that the university doesn’t care about teaching, doesn’t really care about individuals. That it cares only about perpetuating itself, as an insulated island of detached scholars, privileged drones the students support with their tuition, which few of them or their families can afford. Look, you know what to say. We’ve been over this before.

Indeed they had, Donald thought ruefully, many times; and each time it was he himself, he felt, who was under attack as Ted coldly dissected what Donald had always considered the inevitable stupidity that any merely human institution is guilty of, but what Ted labeled as purposeful, intentional, and highly culpable. Donald was inclined to view human history as a kind of vegetative process in which things happened because they happened, like leaves growing from branches, branches from trunks, trunks from roots, because that was the cycle of growth, no reason for it really, just inevitable organic development.

Ted had called this view typical academic shit-head thinking, pointing out that things happen because they are made to happen. The difference between people who do things and people who don’t, he had told Donald, speaking to him as a father might to a sweet, but mildly-retarded, child is that those who do things do them, whereas the others merely think about doing them. It was the same for history; people either thought about what was happening, wondering idly whether there were reasons and what they might be, or they made things happen and encouraged the others to engage more fully in speculation. It was in the latter activity, according to Ted’s view of history, universities were born, as centers to encourage profound, but essentially pointless, thinking, where people were taught to believe themselves wise the less purposeful their activities were, the more detached from society they became.

The terms scholar and scholarship filled Ted with contempt. Donald’s arguments on behalf of knowledge inspired from Ted bitter invective, and his words seemed weak, effete, curiously feminine compared to the vigor of Ted’s attack. He realized he was defending an ideal, a Platonic concept, in which all error had been removed. His was the idea of a university, the idea of learning, which involved intelligent people increasing their knowledge to make an already good world even better.

By contrast, Ted was attacking a reality; no city of God, but a venal citadel filled with fools and incompetents, malcontents and malevolent people, where Truth is sought as infrequently as it is in a brothel or a counting house. In arguments with Ted he almost inevitably found himself yielding before the force of the young man. As a keeper of the faith he was faithful; but he was a poor defender of it. What he could say before the audience or hundreds Ted had promised he couldn’t even imagine.

The closer they came to South Field, Ted’s excitement growing visibly at the prospect of speaking to so many people, the movement of his hands becoming more rapid, the pitch of his voice sharpening as he rehearsed the list of grievances he planned to present, Donald’s hands began to sweat. He felt increasingly feverish, and his mind essentially ceased all rational functioning. Panic swelled in his belly like a great blowfish. His lungs felt compressed; he had trouble breathing. Spots danced before his eyes, and he felt as if he were going to die. As it turned out, though he nearly did, he ought not to have worried at all.

Chapter Two

Earlier that morning it had rained, and low lying clouds still clung to the tops of the hills, the Piedmont of the Southern Appalachians, that receded out of sight to the north. Bluestone University occupied most of the top of a broad, gently sloping hill at whose foot the town of Bluestone, to the east and south, stretched a short way and then yielded first to cultivated fields and small farm houses and then to rich dark forests, hardwoods and pines, reaching as far as the eye could see. Walking through the campus had always given Donald a great deal of pleasure, though on this day