Wilson's Introductions, Forwards and Prefaces to Other Author's Works
from the Introduction to Brainchild by David Jay Brown
....Of course, some readers will be shocked, outraged, or alarmed by the "optimism" of this book. We live in an age when Doomsday scenarios are as fashionable among the lumpen intellectuals as they are among Protestant Fundamentalists. To raise a dissenting voice against the nearly unanimous chorus of pessimism and despair in bon ton literary circles -- especially on the East Coast -- is to sound as eccentric or perverse as that first liberal who suggested in the17th Century that maybe we should burn a few less witches every year, or the Wild Eyed Radicals who argued in the 1830's that the work-day could be cut from 16 hours to 12. Worse: optimism today makes on esound almost as crazy as the Utopians who argued in the 1850's that slavery could be abolished, or the loonies who proclaimed in the 1950's that we could soon put a rocket on the moon.
...I have a unique, or at least peculiar, slant on the Dogma of Despair that grips the Establishment Literati of New York and environs. You see, I was born in a pre-historic age. Dinosaurs still roamed the Earth then, wreaking havoc on the human encampments. (The chief dinosaurs were called Hitler and Mussolini.) I grew up in a typical Stone Age tribe on a long island called, simply, Long Island. My tribe were Irish Catholics and had seized control of an area called Gerison Beach, probably because nobody else thought it was worth living there. There were no paved roads and nobody had central heating. The bungalows had yards around them so big that most people had large vegetable gardens. You cannot imagine the ignorance and brutality of those days.
Most of the men in our tribe were unemployed because of a mysterious metaphysical malaise called The Depression. It was believed that all who became victims of The Depression were responsible for it, and the men were very ashamed of themselves. That did not help them find jobs (there were no jobs) but it encouraged them to drink more and become more Irish in general.
Knowledge of medicine was primitive. I was told on good authority, by the adults of the tribe, that wearing galoshes in the house causes deafness, that masturbation caused blindness, that an old man in Italy called The Pope was infallible, that if you said such words as "cancer" or "tuberculosis" aloud somebody in the family would immediately catch those diseases, that Dinah Shore once had a black baby but gave it up for adoption, etc.
Knowledge of economics was equally paleolithic. Some held that The Depression was the work of evil wizards called the Jewish Bankers, but others insisted it was created by black magicians called the Republican Party. We had heard of Communism and some said there were real live Communists alive just across the river in New York City, but nobody had ever gone there and actually seen a live Communist. Few in our tribe had cars, anymore than they could afford meat for dinner or eating in restaurants like the rich Protestants in Bay Ridge.
There was no knowledge of science at all. The whole tribe believed, like other primitives , that much mana or good luck would enter you if you ate the dead body of a hero, and that our Priest could literally turn a piece of bread into the body of a heroic Jew who died 2000 years ago.
In 1937 my father and many other tribesmen found jobs again; The Depression was ending, as mysteriously as it had begun. Soon, father celebrated by bringing home a radio, and I began receiving signals from outside the tribal reality-tunnel.
Over 50 years later, sitting in my study in Los Angeles, writing this on a word processor that would have seemed "magick" to anybody in my childhood, I marvel at how totally my tribe has disappeared. Gerison Beach now has paved roads and is full of Condominiums with central heating. Irish Catholics, somehow related to me, exist all over the U.S., but they are not perfectly Irish or Catholic anymore. Since the rise of TV, every child picks up more signals about the rest of the Earth in a single day than I picked up in my first 14 years (up until I entered Brooklyn Technical High School.) Young people can no more image The Depression accurately than I can visualize the 13th Century with any vividness. The world has simply mutated.
