Ideological Analysis of "On This Bus"

RIDING NAKED ON RIC MASTEN’S BUS

by Jim Benton

            A lifetime of Ric Masten’s ideas and ideals are detectable in a single poem he wrote roughly halfway through his life in 1969.  “On This Bus” demonstrates his persistent attention to the overlooked and undervalued people of the world and his affirmation that we all share the same life struggles.  The poem expresses his willingness and ability to put himself and his readers into moments of insight and vulnerability without explanation or justification. And, finally, the brief text shows Masten’s unfailing refusal to be sentimental or saccharin or to offer simplistic solutions or facile observations about the lives we live on this bus we ride.

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Ric Masten’s Bus

            In a 2008 article “John Steinbeck’s Sweetheart: The Cosmic American Bus” in College Literature (35.1, Winter 2008, pp. 82-99), Cathryn Halverson argues that:

            .... [while] the bus is a neglected site of cultural interpretation in American studies.... buses perpetually appear in American literature, music, and film, associated with urban and rural extremes; minutely mapped city spaces and unknowably vast (often western) open ones; working-class transformation and middle-class disorientation. Signifying a nation huge in size but local in character, the bus is a class-loaded symbol of America that at once evokes the mundane and the extraordinary. (http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/college_literature/v035/35.1halverson.html)

            Authors of many genres have employed the great leveling effect of a bus ride in a variety of time periods and genres.  Morris McCorvey’s 1992 volume Bus Station Poems (Bartlesville,OK: Celestial Press) employs bus imagery in a collection of poems that move from street-level observation to literary allusion, from dark to light, heavy to light. (e.g. “In a cold, hard sleetstorm, we arrive at an empty station / Mid-winter night. Everybody’s got hollow eyes, / And the waitress at the snack bar does not smile...”. (p. 18)  In his novel The Right Mistake (New York: BasicCivitas, 2009) Walter Mosley places his protagonist on a Los Angeles city bus:

           

            Socrates sat in the right front aisle seat of a scarlet and gold colored

            Crenshaw bus, almost next to the driver.  Someone in the seat directly

            behind him had just taken a swig of gin.  The woman sitting next to him

            had the smell of cigarettes coming off of her clothes. (p. 83)

           

            Ric Masten wrote a poem titled “On This Bus” published in 1980. (Stark Naked in ’69 and ’79.  Carmel, CA: Sunflower Ink, 1980, p. 3) Simply by choosing to write a poem about an insight that occurred during a bus ride, Ric Masten stakes out an ideological territory shared with Steinbeck, McCorvey, Mosely, and many others.  It is not a place for the literary elite or the upper classes; it is a place where truth and value lie with the working-class people, with Okies and rednecks, black folks and Mexicans, the poor and pungent, the unwashed and unwelcome.  It is not only the place Masten wrote about; it is the place he lived.  For many years, he and his wife drove the country in a rusty old Toyota van with his guitar and a huge black three-ring binder holding his poems and songs.  They stayed overnight with acquaintances new and old or slept in the van,  and he read and sang his poems at churches and community colleges, not at the big venues and great universities.  He even read at Anamosa State Penitentiary, characteristically venturing that “no one was sure / a poetry reading / in a penitentiary / wouldn’t be considered / cruel and unusual punishment.” (Even As We Speak. Carmel, CA: Sunflower Ink, 1982, p. 28)  In the preface to Stark Naked Maurice Friedman explains that Masten “authenticates his poems with his own existence.” (p. x)  In other words, he lives his poetry.

            In a culture known for its love of fast cars (and tough pick-up trucks) Ric Masten is more of a bus man.  In “Car Theft and  the Best Policy”, he lists ten “simple things you can do to protect / your means of transportation / from the hot-wire artist”, including: “ -- always park under a starling / -- burn holes in the upholstery / ... -- replace the antenna with a coat hanger / -- store the spare tire in the back seat / ... --start a beer can collection on the floor / ...”  (Even As We Speak, p. 16)  He further suggests that “if / however / you choose to drive a status symbol / ...” maybe you’re asking for trouble.  He writes of buying for a dollar a “battered old 1953 GMC / ... painted orange / a shade obscene / and decorated by my own hand / and foolishness /”.  In 1969. (Stark Naked, p. 10)  In “The Day a Great Nation Became Pedestrian” he exults, “and wouldn’t you like to have been there?/ ... when the highway patrol / had nothing to do put pick its nose/...” because the world’s oil supply was cut short and people had to wait in long lines for gas “... for only on days difficult as these / can the man in the street emerge triumphant / and come trooping away from the pumps / a full jerry can at his side / his fist in the air -- delirious -- whooping / with glee /...”.  (p. 69) Or sitting side-by-side on a crowded city bus with a tax attorney?  Naked.

            As he does in “On This Bus” and in every poem, Masten chooses simple, uncomplicated diction and syntax.  He writes for ordinary people not just about them.  And he places poet and reader on buses, in assembly lines and prisons, doing yard work and swatting flies, eating tunafish sandwiches and scrambled eggs, eschewing capitalization and punctuation as well as recognition.  As he notes elsewhere in Stark Naked, “a garden salad by picasso / would be as tasty as old canvas and varnish” and “no doubt / the sound of a string quartet is more uplifting / than the sizzle of bacon in the pan / but by intermission a sweaty musician / doesn’t smell as good”. (pp. 66-67)  A fellow traveler whom he later left “... standing on the curb / outside the monterey bus station” performed an impromptu concert on the roadside for him, but, failing to find a review, a photo, or a recording in the music store, Masten concludes: “so i guess it never happened / huh?”. 

            Ric Masten’s poetry bus is a vehicle for the alienated and disenfranchised not the highbrow, high-dollar, High Life crowd; for the authentic and ordinary not the well-heeled and sophisticated.  On this bus, even the best-dressed, most protected of us are, in the end, stark naked.

First Stop: The Corner of 1970s and 1980s

             

                 In a 1982 essay titled “Combating Racism: Touch and Tell”, ethicist / activist Richard A. Hoehn, argued that, as human beings, “We experience other people and things as ‘like us’ or ‘not like us.’ The more unlike they are, the more they occasion a sort of disquiet or anxiety.” He suggested that, despite persistent resistance, almost thirty years of school busing in the United States had helped to remove “one crucial sensate element of strangeness” operating underneath the surface of black/white racism. (Christian Century, March 3, 1982, p. 238. http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1287)  In short, Prof. Hoehn argued that students’ experience of riding the same bus as others with whom they had previously had little or no contact had helped (and was continuing to help) break down the intuitive assumption of “otherness” that separated students of different races.

            In the late 1970s and early 1980s, after roughly thirty years of school busing, thoughtful observers of American culture were seeking to evaluate its effects along with other sweeping changes of the previous decade.  Whether or not Dr. Hoehn and Ric Masten ever read each other’s works, both wound up on the same bus with “the other” at the intersection of the 1970s and 1980s.  Hoehn responded by writing an essay published in 1982; Masten’s poem was published in 1980.  It is not just the fact that they wrote observations about buses and their riders that connects the works of Masten and Hoehn.  It is also that they wrote at a time when the great social change and ideological outporing of a previous generation were losing their momentum and becoming objects of historical social analysis.  And both engaged in that analysis.

            “On This Bus” is the first poem in Masten’s Stark Naked in ’69 and ’79.  The collection contains 23 poems the author had written “in ’69” and 26 written “in ’79.” Prompted by the “feeling, which Ric himself shares, of the enormous changes in our outlook since the poems of 1969,” Maurice Friedman asked Masten “what unites the poems of 1969 and the poems of 1979 that [are] grouped together in Stark Naked.” (Preface, p. x) Having discovered that we are all on this same bus, what is it that we share with each other and with the people on this bus ten years ago?  It is the question of the times: what unites the ideals and dreams of the previous decade with those of this one? What unites the hopes of school busing with the realities a decade later?

            As reported by Friedman, Masten’s answer rings out loud and clear and stunning: “Myself.” (p. x)  My God!  Did that answer just occur to him?  What kind of answer is that?  It’s not clothed in explanation or complexity or modesty even. It’s just out there! Stark naked.

            It is the nature of our human nakedness that Ric Masten explores in his poetry and his life. Remember, it’s underneath our clothes - poet, professor, narrator, reader, driver, passengers - that everyone of us is naked!  To get anxious novices over their stage fright, speech coaches often counsel them to imagine that the people in their audience are naked.  But when Ric Masten is reading or singing, he is the naked one.  And he is not standing there like we have all been known to do -- with great shock and shame -- in dreams.  No, this poet is inviting us, his audience, his fellow passengers, to get over our fears and anxieties and, as he does, hear “myself blurting out / publicly / that i secretly enjoyed THE SOUND OF MUSIC / and watch LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE /...” (p. 71)

            From 1969 to 1979, Masten - himself! - grew and changed and rose and fell and succeeded and failed, and in “On This Bus” and the volume of his poetry it opens, he embraces those realities, strips the clothes right off them.  As he writes in a brief note preceding the poems from ’69, “Much of what was good enough ten years ago seems awkward and embarrassing ... today.  I can’t tell you how many times I have winced over these songs and poems...  So, red-faced and covering my nudity with fluttering hands, I resist the temptation to dicker with this material.... Here it is, then, the way it was -- 1969”. (p.1)

            Unlike his cerebral counterpart Richard Hoehn, Masten is not seeking a defense or a rational conclusion about the changes of the previous decade.  Instead, he reveals his own bumpy ten-year bus ride.  And invites critics and social historians not just to examine the trends and consequences but to step into the moments of nerve and naivete, of faith and foolishness.

            As an example of the cost of nakedness, Masten reveals a black and white photo of himself taken by photographer Cole Weston in 1954.  In the photo, he is, of course, naked and, not surprisingly, out on a limb.  In the note preceding the section of 1979 poems, he writes, “I look at the work I produced in 1979 as this same kind of self-conscious posing.  Exposing myself, but doing it in order to get a larger perspective on a much larger picture.” (p. 33)  The first poem in the 1979 section describes his twenty-five years of discomfort with that youthful act. He explains, “aside from baby pictures / it was the only time i ever posed nude / so i suppose / because the flesh was mine / i blow the whole thing out of proportion”. (p. 35)  And, seeing him, a tiny blur lying on the limb of an enormous leafless tree, the reader is inclined to agree.

            But that’s not the point.  The nakedness we share on Ric Masten’s bus is not some photo of an awkward moment posted on the Internet.  We do not leave our nakedness behind at the bus stop of our past.  We were not naked in 1969 or 1979 and then got dressed up in the spring of 2010. The poems we write, the hopes we embrace, the ideals we value are never left behind because we continue writing new poems, embracing new hopes, valuing new ideals.  And today’s certainties will be tomorrow’s foolishness.

            Nakedness travels with us, and we cannot travel without it. It is our unprotectable vulnerability - the imperfections and failures and fears we cannot hide no matter how many layers of self-protection we may clothe ourselves in.  The nakedness we share on this bus is not the embarrassment of past mistakes; it is the certainty of more to come.  It is the inescapable reality that on this ride we take through life, we are all getting bounced around, we all have to stand sometimes, we all spill hot coffee and step on others’ feet, we are all here on board with people and situations and smells and intrusions we would not choose.  This bus is the present moment, occurring to us just now, as we are moving inexorably forward. It is a vehicle that insists that we move ahead instead of looking back, that we notice the moment instead of analyzing the past, that we travel with honesty and directness instead of posing and protecting.  As Masten says, “haven’t we all stood helplessly / in hospital halls and put children on buses / and haven’t we all been to the grave / together”.  (Even As We Speak, p.70)  And don’t we all know where this bus is taking us in the end?

Naked to the Last Stop

            Underneath our transcripts and resumes, our private histories and our personal accomplishments, underneath our shiny cars and our overwrought ideological analyses, everyone on this planet is starkly, nakedly vulnerable.  Stripped down to our birthday suits, everyone is mortal, fallible, fearful.  And alone.

            Ric Masten’s bus is no yellow submarine happy place where we can all get naked and party like there’s no tomorrow.  Recognizing our shared human reality does not rescue us from life’s struggles.  It is crucial to understand that, as Masten sees it, being together on this bus does not save us from our nakedness.  There is no concluding stanza here about our love and support for one another, our acceptance and appreciation of our  togetherness.  In the Preface to The Deserted Rooster (Carmel,CA: Sunflower Ink, 1982, p. xii) Jack Kisling clarifies the effect of riding with Masten:

            Ric never suggests that we’re all in this together, nor that we’re all in this

            alone.  Instead he reminds us, and his poems confirm it, that we’re not alone       alone.

Whatever comfort may be gathered by recognizing our nakedness, it does not eliminate that nakedness.  We are not freed from loneliness by seeing what Masten sees; we are freed from denying or fearing it.

            An intensely personal poem in the 1979 section of Stark Naked is accompanied by a photo of Masten and his old friend Cole Weston the photographer who positioned Masten naked on the limb of a tree twenty-five years before.  They are old men, gray and balding, clutching one another in unmistakable grief:

            i will be your wailing wall man friend

            lean on me and rail against the insanity

            of life / death

            ....

            beat on me -- weep on me

            old fighter

            i will hold you up as you would me

            later i will stack these words one upon the other

            like stones lifted from my chest

            and then fall sobbing against this wall of work  (p. 44)

In this poetic moment Masten’s ideology of shared nakedness is met at its most poignant.  We are all broken and vulnerable here, and there is only the recognition of that pain, the sharing of it, the expression of it in whatever ways we can find.  I cannot take away your pain nor even understand it, but I will receive and accept it.  And, like you, I will travel with my own pain and nakedness.  And that is all there is.  “Everyone on this bus / is stark naked”, and there is nothing more to say.

            Masten was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and given a few months to live in February, 1999. During the next nine years before he died, he maintained a website on which he published poems and drawings and shared the intimate details of his ups and downs and jolts of chemotherapy, his thoughts of suicide and fears for his wife’s care, with unflinching honesty about his own limits.  He wrote: 

            Toko writes, ‘Death poems are an illusion – death is death.’

            so try as I might my attempts

            all turn out to be about life.”

(http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/archives/2008/2008-May-15/ric-masten-dies-as-he-lived--full-of-light-and-feeling-blessed/1/@@index) 

            His last published works appear in a volume titled Going Out Dancing. (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2008)  It may be safely inferred that the dancing referred to in that title occurred stark naked.

NOTES:

1.   An ideological analysis may not have to be a research project, but, more than the aesthetic analysis, the ideological analysis must draw evidence from beyond the page of text.

1.

2.  Ideological analysis typically assumes that every author is shaped by the issues and patterns of her or his times.  Analyzing the ideology of a text and its author must include some evidence from the author’s other works and the historical / political / social context of the author’s life and writing.

3.   The use of the metaphorical language of the text itself allows the critic to maintain ongoing connections to the text without continual explicit explanations.  But it can be overdone.

QUESTIONS:

1.   Is extensive research necessary to analyze a literary text ideologically?

            How much evidence from beyond the text itself is appropriate

                        to include in an ideological analysis?

2.   Does every text reveal some ideology?

            Is every text an ideological statement in one way or another?

3.   Is consideration of the author’s intent a different kind of consideration in writing

            an ideological analysis than it is in writing an aesthetic analysis?

4.   In what ways can “creative” metaphorical language help and hinder the effectiveness of an analysis?  How can a critic tell if she or he is drifting into “too cute”?

4.

5.   Is it really okay to use first and second person pronouns in literary criticism? 

            Who says?