America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic by Phillip Freedenberg
America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic
by Phillip Freedenberg
Visuals by Jeff Walton
Published in 2021 by Corona/Samizdat
An author and an illustrator, Phillip Freedenberg and Jeff Walton, work on a book. While doing so, they excitedly await the arrival of The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas by author and publisher Rick Harsch. Harsch’s book will help them, they think, complete their own, and Harsch-as-publisher will complete the logistical loop to release the (Cactus) book to the masses. These three (Freedenberg, Walton, Harsch) form the nucleus of what is referred to as the Cult of the Cactus Boots, which is a group that exists in some unspecified point in the future under the banner of creative freedom, striving for true release from oppression, to help unify humanity and collective thought within the unified field. The overall setting is grim, post apocalyptic, reflective of our own in that all thought, word, and creativity have been actively stamped out by a government organization called TICI (Total Information Control Initiative), which uses screens to brainwash people, storing their thoughts and replacing them with ones approved by the oppressors. Prescient, no?
So we begin a messy adventure where Freedenberg and Walton move through their own book, trying to complete it and see its release. The hook: do they complete the book? Do they meet Rick in the process, and how does this help (if it does at all)? The answer(s) has them traversing various realities, including an underground network of word tunnels, to bring their ultimate form and message to the people (the people being us, the reader). Because of this structure, the fictionalized versions of Freedenberg and Walton are constantly referring to themselves, this book, and the cult. In the future accounting of this world, the cult has become massive and has helped foster creative thought throughout the universe.
There are references to pataphysics and warped realities throughout, so you can imagine the forms of play involved, its indebtedness to surrealism, and its potential to create myth. The book will lay out frameworks and subsequently provide context for them 50 or 100 pages later, so that you, the reader, can refer back to them and begin to decode the various layers of language and creativity on display. The idea, I think, is to use the form of the book as a device to connect/reconnect us to our imagination(s). It is affective, stirring the imagination and reminding us of the limitations that we place upon ourselves, whether the limitations be constraints of thought or constraints of not being able to break through the layers of everyday existence that work to undermine our ability to push into a pure creative state, unbound from the layers of dutiful life that keep from actually living.
Perhaps the book’s biggest strength is how it plays with form, working with an idea/question that I’ve long been interested in: is it possible to create new meaning(s) by combining words or images (signs) in new or until-now new ways? This is definitely something pulled from the French surrealists (and works alongside the afore-mentioned pataphysics). The Lacanian battle of sign and signifier drives so much of the narrative, playing with the loose associations that create meaning and ultimately signify their own abstraction, suggesting that these abstract associations are what free us creatively and allow for exciting, new expressions.
As important as narrative and textual form, this book pushes into often-uncharted waters for literature: illustration, via the work of Jeff Walton. I’ve been thinking a lot about how isolated and singular the act of writing tends to be and why this is. There is so much to explore through authorial collaboration, whether with other writers or, as is the case here, with illustrators. We have so few good, successful examples of this kind of collaboration that I feel it necessary to point out.
Ultimately, this book understands that we, as individuals who crave our individualism (thanks to the counter-culture movement of the 60s) and have since been marketed to so that we stay happy and satisfied within our individuality, are starting to fall apart because we are realizing that our individuality does not actually address the human need for order and stability. Religion understands this. Science can be used to understand this. So we look for belief systems that allow us to feel safe and continue on with our lives without having to actually change much of anything. But the days of complicit comfort are quickly coming to an end, and this book offers a new belief system, something to rally around, an option to give up our individualism, just a bit, to be a part of something bigger, to be a part of something that is able to seize a moment and make a positive, moral change, i.e., use power for good, which, we must concede is still possible. Or we can bury our heads in the sand and let those who control everything continue to put us in our comfortable boxes where we learn and earn less and less every day, reinforcing our own fears and frustrations. That this book offers a possible way forward while addressing major problems should be applauded, and so I do applaud it. And so I also recommend it to you now to hopefully help pull you out of fear and into (either inward or outward) action.