Salem to Salem: Belief

If I had to pick my angriest book, sure as shit it would be this. I mean, damn, this is a furious novel. And I'm not so sure it's furious in a good way, either. I was really, really angry with my university's bureaucracy when I wrote this and, no joke, modelled the doublethink and thoughtcrime on the university and Student Union. These days I can let back on this with more of a "huh!" chill expression I'm sure you'll be relieved to hear. The ending, based on John Ford's The Searchers, feels even more rage-filled and hopeless than that of the film given that the western's ending has somewhat of a hopeful feeling while, in this book, there's a sense that the world is bleak now, full of people suspicious of witchcraft, and that Abigail and her family are doomed.

I could be really cynical and say this is what my university taught me but, really, it's what eight years of university (not just that university, but three universities) taught me. Universities create their own reality (a bad thing) just as we writers and artists do. Any educational place creates its own reality. It's up to us to determine what really is "reality" and that's another question entirely. I believe, like Bob Dylan, that we create ourselves and own reality based on a grounding in what we see, what we hear, what we feel and what we know. We have to distinguish between reality and ideology. I don't believe that universities can make that distinction.

That's not necessarily a universally bad thing. Churches, mosques, synagogues, etc. do not distinguish between reality and ideology; what they believe is entirely legitimate. In the place of universities, what each university believes of course is a case-by-case basis and while some university ideas can be legitimate, some university ideologies can never be.