The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer in “God’s Attic”: Difference between revisions

<blockquote>All the messages of North America go up to the Brooks Range. That land above the circle, man, is the land of icy wilderness and the lost peaks and the unseen deeps and spires, the crystal receiver of the continent.

The extraordinary aspect of the Alaskan psyche is that the future of this state is totally unknown. But it is an unknown in extremes, for the end result will be one of two opposites, the best or the worst.

You could become the psychic leader of America, revitalizing all the dead circuits and dead fuses. It is a responsibility Alaskans should face up to.</blockquote>

<blockquote>A minority group is caught between two basic conflicts of culture. This conflict has meaning and takes substance only within the minority group, of course, and perhaps you could say that one culture exists within the other culture, creating the conflict.

I am a one-man minority group. I have to contend with two opposing forces, two cultures. In a minority group we have a life psychology built upon two rocks sometimes dangerously far apart.

We’re forced to go through life with a psychology profoundly different from most people—a very divided existential psychology.

To balance the conflict, we consider ourselves in two different ways, as superior or inferior, and this can be a conflict within itself.

When you’re within a minority group, your ego is always on edge—always on an elevator going up or down. When you walk along the street the people you meet and see, depending on who they are, cause your ego to rise or fall and splinter in different ways. It’s up and down all the time, and never stable.

According to this notion, everyone in Alaska can be said to be a member of a minority group. This state has more of a divided sense of itself than any state I’ve ever been in. Alaskans have sort of a vast, group inferiority complex, feeling themselves backward and behind the cultural development of other states. Yet, at the same time Alaskans are intensely proud. There are people willing to die for this state.

And so, as a minority group, you spend your life constantly redefining your role within the dominating group.</blockquote>

when he phones some “wilderness city,” somewhere, to say Hi to Cherry and Marilyn, before exiting due north, direct, to the Brooks Range to say hello

and press the flesh with God.

=== Citations ===