Alan Williamson

Peter Dale Scott's Epic: Towards a Stopping-Place

The personal is political, went a much-quoted, and much misused, slogan of the 1970s. For more than fifteen years, Peter Dale Scotts ongoing epic poem has documented, with a rare open-mindedness and curiosity, the actual intersections between his life as a political activist and his other lives?religious, aesthetic, familial, erotic. A third volume, excerpted here, is now nearing completion. The view of politics itself has darkened a good deal, over the years. The con spiracy hunter often seems lost in a Pynchonesque labyrinth, where he cannot tell the endless chain of clues from randomness, coinci dence, and deliberate disinformation. Worse, he is no longer quite sure who are the good guys, who the bad. What if the exhibitionism of the New Left caused the election of Reagan? What if Nixon fell not for his vices but his virtues?his d?tente with Russia and China too much for even more right-wing elements in the FBI and CIA? What if Jimmy Carter, appearances to the contrary, was a more com pliant President? As T. S. Eliot, the subject of Scotts doctoral disser tation, wrote in Gerontion,

From An Airplane

anything, even the Cross: they carried beams thirty miles on their shoulders from Taylor Mountain, and any that touched the ground couldnt be used in the church roof; they were tapered to candy-cane-colored candles for the reredos. In their pottery, one is always at the center of interlocking weather—sweeps and stairways of black, with the little triangles inside them meaning lightning. Its one of