The genius of Norman O. Brown

Brown's analysis of political behavior and historic repetition in Love's Body, with its roots in the thinking of Marx, Freud and Blake, sure describes what is happening in Portland today. It's a grim message because there is no "collective" solution, no "progress," only individual and personal salvation. Brown isn't the only thinker to reach this conclusion but Love's Body, which reads like an extended prose poem, presents the case with more epigrammatic verve and memorable lines than most. Some gems I remember by heart:

• Personality is the original personal property.
• Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad.
• It's not true unless it hurts.
• Modern war is war perverted. The problem isn't war but the perversion.
• The true fight, the mental fight, "the fiery chariot of his contemplative thought" (Blake).

My first play, "Above the Fire," which won 3rd place in a national competition and inspired me to change my focus from fiction to playwriting as an MFA student at the University of Oregon in the 1960s, got its title and theme from Love's Body and the particular Blake-influenced quotation above. That's how influential this book has been in my intellectual development.

I was flown to the Univ of Missouri for its production and treated like a big shot. They put me up in the Daniel Boone Hotel! I liked it. I got an early very misleading notion of what the life of a writer was like.