Halcyon days

[Scintilla prompt choices: 1. When did you realize you were a grown up? What did this mean for you? Shock to the system? Mourning of halcyon younger days? Or the embracing of the knowledge that you can do all the cool stuff adults do: drink wine, go on parent-free vacations, eat chocolate without reprimand? 2. No one does it alone. Write a letter to your rescuer or mentor (be it a person, book, film, record, anything). Share the way they lit up your path.]

The thing is, I don’t know what “halcyon” means. The thing is, for someone who likes to string words together now and then, I’m not especially literate. Until my mid-twenties, I didn’t even read (voluntarily, anyway), much less write. I was the kid who would rather go outside in the driveway and shoot baskets — in the dark, in the rain, or even in the snow — than sit on my ass staring at little black marks on paper. My brother was always reading. Mom too. And they were the two in the family condemned to wear big, thick glasses for the rest of their days. Me, I craved movement. There was just nothing to me quite as sublime as the raw sensations of my body moving through space, responding, reacting, just being what a body is, doing what a body was designed to do.

Of course, I was forced to read some, in order to jump through the seemingly endless hoops put before me by my teachers. And so I jumped, collecting my blue ribbons, but gosh was it all so damned boring. I especially detested English class, where I was forced to read a lot. I read those famous poems, that supposedly “great literature,” like Beowulf and whatnot. Didn’t understand a word of it (although the Cliff’s Notes and my older brother’s papers helped create the requisite illusion of understanding). Heck, I wasn’t even interested in reading the issues of Sports Illustrated my parents ordered for me. I would flip through the latest magazine, enjoy the great photos, then run back outside to enjoy the real thing. Movement!

I turned twenty six before I finally laid hands on the book that would open me to the world of imagination and creativity. It was Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn. I was in the laundry room of my apartment complex, waiting for my jeans to dry. There was a pile of old books that residents had left there for just such a moment as this, when one had about five minutes or so to kill. I mindlessly picked up the book and opened it to a page at random. What I read didn’t make a lick of sense. The language was all over the place, flung onto to page stream-of-consciousness style it seemed, but nonetheless I was intrigued. There was life in these words.

My jeans were burnt around the edges before I roused myself from my trance. I couldn’t put the book down. I started from the beginning, but it seemed not to matter where I started. There wasn’t really much structure to the thing, in terms of plot, character development, dialogue. It struck me as pure creative expression, and unlike the stuff I choked down in high school, I found myself actually relating to what I was reading. Sort of… The truth is, I didn’t really understand why I was digging this book so much. The whole experience struck me as strange, but tantalizing. I was on the threshold of the about-to-be-known, like when, at the age of twelve or so, I would stay up late to watch dirty movies on HBO. I didn’t quite “get” the world of sex at that point, but I knew I was onto to something big, something compelling, all-consuming. No turning back now. And so it was with Miller’s world of “art.”

It’s hard to believe, looking back, that I transformed so quickly from a person possessing not a spark of creativity to one who would come to place an almost supreme value on the creative process. Seemingly overnight I began reading voraciously, writing on an almost daily basis. I grew my hair long, bought a 1971 VW Bus, learned to play guitar, started writing songs.

Although I credit Miller with ushering me into the world of art and creativity, I certainly don’t idolize the man. As a human being, his flaws are as glaring as any I’ve known. Even his writing is, in my opinion, hit or miss. And yet no amount of crappy writing or biographical demystifying can diminish in the slightest what Miller imparted to me that day in the laundry room. These things defy explanation, as when a few years later I was simply bowled over by the music of Jeff Mangum. When my best friend (an almost worshipful Mangum fan at the time) first played me his latest record, my initial reaction was something like, “His voice is kind of annoying. Sounds like a goat and duck having sex in a garbage can.” Yet, as with those first flourishes of Miller’s Capricorn, I was intrigued enough to delve deeper, eventually breaking through to a whole new musical perspective.

Or maybe I didn’t really break through to a new place, but rather it was I who was broken down, made more receptive in some way. I only know this: I was moved. Movement! Life! Yes, somehow that’s it, the heart of the matter, although I can’t explain it anymore than I could tell you what “halcyon” means, or what Beowulf was about.

This, however, a gift from my friend Henry, is something I know in my bones. It is the gift really, the one that blew open all the doors:

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he gets desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.

If I had been assigned Miller in high school, I probably would have disregarded him along with the rest. They say that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. I was ready for Miller at twenty six. I can’t help but wonder, what now? Will there be any more surprises, any more mentors, any more soul shaking revelations? Might there be another gift, one perhaps lying around right out in the open, waiting for me to grow the new eyes needed to recognize it for what it truly is…