Whatever I said, however I begged, their copies of everything were dogged and lifeless and scared. Like most people they were helpless to copy appearances. Their images were either small and cramped as microbes or big as pumpkins. There’d be tiny boiled-down mountains or a gaseous wallowing bowl of peaches on the verge of crowding people off the planet. I’d patrol their easels and drawing boards, exhorting attention, pleading for scale. Let the peach on paper be the realer peach, the one you’d rather have.
I was behind on my reading of contemporary fiction and poetry. So I didn’t know that, at that moment in San Francisco and New York, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac were urging the same. Transcribe the world! They thought of their method as Buddhist. I thought of mine as Christian, but I kept that to myself.
Hadn’t Jesus gone to great lengths, in numbers of parables, to teach just that? Only the endlessly watchful life is worth living and will be rewarded. What I say to you, I say to all— watch! And by watchful he didn’t mean condemning or fearful but attentive. You watch your particular set of external objects because you love, or at least respect, them on faith. And because you watch them, you train that respect to know them better. Then you go on watching with an even deeper, though maybe more painful, devotion.
Was I badly off course, for my time and place? Who isn’t, in his or her early twenties? They’re an even more self-intoxicated age than adolescence. If I was at fault, and most times I think I was, then my mistake lay in operating on such a highfalutin base with creatures as impressionable as boys. Sometimes still I defend myself by saying that not a soul in camp, in either session, knew the contents of my mind. They had only my acts to watch and my words to hear. And those were straightforward performances of daily duty, salted with what I hoped was enough wit for freshness and the prevention of boredom.
Whatever light my thinking cast as a torch for my own life and work, I kept it a secret dynamo humming at the center of my mind. For me it lit every sketch I drew, every roll call, every tick hunt. On Sunday mornings after Saturday jamborees, we checked each boy for the all too common tick. Ticks could give you Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and most boy’s scalps were studded with ticks after any short hike, but again nobody came down with anything worse than the sniffles. Even my own two sons, when they hit adolescence twenty-five years later—they barely glanced up from their own self-regard to hear my stream of tactful suggestions. For all they knew, or cared apparently, I might just be a money-secreting fungus on the ground at their feet. More lately here though, things have improved.
But in the 1950s if a lot of my guidance came from the life of Jesus, then was I a Christian? I still believed that the man Jesus was a good deal more than a man and had died in some entirely mysterious way as a blood sacrifice for you and me. So my big problem was not with him but with the outfits that called themselves “his” church. When I read in Carl Jung that religion was a way to avoid having religious experiences, I heard my own mind. It still impresses me no little that, in the whole New Testament, Jesus goes to church—synagogue—not more than twice by my count, and each time it gets him in serious trouble.
I’ve mentioned being raised a Presbyterian, and I’d sat through Sunday school and several hundred sermons in my childhood and teens. And in college I’d already taken more than the one required Bible course, but back at age nineteen the church and I had agreed to separate. I thought church religion was good for who it was good for, and that I was no good for it or it for me. That meant, by the time I was in college, I’d basically become an agnostic mystic, if that sounds vague enough. I don’t mean a man who sits out naked and stares at the sun till his eyeballs boil. Or a self-flagellator whose tortured flesh is now and then rewarded with visions of God as an oiled sexy lover.
I just mean a person who feels inspired to conduct his own relations with the mainline energy behind creation. What’s agnostic is that I’m sure the mainline circuit is something far too complicated for me, or any other creature, to know entirely —much less map out for future control. In light of what’s coming later here, I need to say that none of this means that I can’t get roused at the right time and place to some fairly hot feelings and acts. I can.
I mean I’ve got down on my knees and kissed the spot in Jerusalem where Jesus’ dead body almost certainly lay till it came to life, and I feel no shame in saying as much. Places get holy, some rare few places; and you want to know what’s what and when to bow. After the real-estate agents have had their century of freedom in America, there’s little enough left where you can even see dirt, much less the god in it. So you’ve got to keep looking. You can’t just prostrate yourself at every crossroads tomb of a president or other licensed killer. That’s idol worship and is also indecent.
If you’re young and male, working long days and eating great helpings of farm-fresh food in mountain air with unlimited butter, milk, cheese and ice cream, then your main problem with decency is going to be sex. Now well on in my sixth decade —age fifty-four—and hardly out of the running, I can recall the unquenchable erotic fury of those years with awe and frank pride. The awe comes from looking back and seeing my long slender body seized at the waist, in the vast and thoroughly capable jaws of Eros, and shook. In my case serious shaking began in the sixth grade and continued, with no more than breathers for food and laundry, till my late forties when the jaws seemed a little less fierce than before, though by no means weak.
Young people in the 1960s announced that they’d discovered free sex. They proceeded to give each other fleas and to bore the rest of us speechless right on till now when the immense and incalculable horror of AIDS promises to alter mankind’s sexuality and our cell-by-cell feeling for the loveliness of human flesh more profoundly than anything else in history, syphilis included. People after all occasionally recovered from syphilis or endured mild cases, even before treatments were discovered and the spirochete had picked off Beethoven, Schubert, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Verlaine and Gauguin just to start the roll.
But we in the 1950s were supremely lucky, I still think, in maturing at a time when sex was not in the glare of public lights. You could sleep with your girlfriend or sister or a whore or the boy next door or for that matter with your parents. And there wouldn’t be a pollster, a welfare worker or a representative of CBS News standing by the bed waiting for the heaves to subside so he could ask you to rate your experience for sensory reward and moral value.
There were a lot of virgins among us, of all ages and genders. There were also a lot of thoroughly industrious indulgers, male and female. They were recognizable only by a faint though enviable smile and a refusal to talk or above all to brag. Between the extremes lay the frustrated millions who claimed to be in mortal need but who were secretly relieved to have a few more years of passive seasoning in the cave of adolescence before rushing onto the drenched and floodlit field of combat. Whichever, if you needed a little pornography to help you in your anatomy lessons and to buff your imagination, it could always be found cheap at the tobacconist’s or on grade-school playgrounds. Recall those late-lamented and elegantly drawn funny books where Sandy was boarding an eager Orphan Annie, or Popeye in full spinach frenzy was transporting Olive to the heights of bliss?
If you fell into the majority of American male youth, you went to your room and joined the silent majority of self-servers, again and again and again. Unfortunately sexual surveys had not yet permeated us guilt-crazed youngsters with the news that we were the overwhelming majority. So we labored alone —shamefully producing, casting and running our own mental movies for an audience consisting, safely but sadly, of our lone selves.
I’ll add only that, in line with my policy of decency where possible, I adopted a rule for my sexual fantasies. I could not cast any real girl or woman in my head movies unless she’d given me permission to do so. Permission could be given in two ways. Either she had already appeared in real movies and thus offered herself for fantasy work or she, in person, had permitted me sufficient liberties. This
rule, strict as it was, still left me Rita Hayworth, Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, not to mention a few good sports on my block and at school.
To be brief I arrived at Juniper as a thoroughly debauched yet technical virgin. I had not quite had intercourse but almost, a few dozen times. I’d had no regular sweetheart since my four-year high-school girlfriend left me for the quarterback, literally. At college I’d gone out with several of the blazingly intelligent and witty girls of that era, the female inhabitants of early Roth and Updike stories. One in particular—a tall brunette from Lyme, Connecticut—was my principle resource.
She finished my education in female parts. And we laughed our way through it, together or in distended letters when we were separated, as now. By mail we’d make flat-out full love. But in real life at the end of our stupendously successful games, she would always find my dilated eyes and say sadly “We aren’t meant to do this forever, you know?” The fact that she always stopped us from doing it all—and the further fact that our hair and eyes were duplicates of one another and that people often mistook us for siblings—gives the memory of us a weird lovely spin, even today. Bad as it hurt, I guess she was right. We weren’t meant to do it.
So understand that I got to Juniper—wondering if I was meant to, ever, go all the way? And while I plan to avoid boring insistence on the matter, anyone hoping to understand this story will need to recall that, all through the summer, I was fired up in that whole territory too and that my one self-administered vent was far from sufficient to cool me safely. The constant and comic sight of prepubescent male bodies served only to remind me that I—a man already past the flood tide of reproductive power but roaring—was still, practically speaking, as nearly a eunuch as they with their pitiful tubular hairless frames and trembling blue tadpole dicks.
Finding ten minutes alone for self-fulfillment was a near impossibility. You’d have thought a camp in the midst of wild forest would be ideal. But I tried locking the Thunderbird door only to have Chief insert his pass key and almost catch me. I hiked up the mountain behind Cabin 16 and found a secluded mossy niche only to have two of my boys scramble up noisily, with their new Indian pathfinding skills, and ask was I safe? My only hope was to wait past their bedtime, count all their breaths by way of roll call, then quickly dispatch myself in the freezing black night. It was sad deprivation for a body young as mine and so eager to please.
If I missed sex, I didn’t miss love. Maybe I’ve been abnormal in that. But from late childhood, I’ve got pretty much all the love I needed in doing my work. I’ve thought all along anyhow, and hoped, that my painting absorbs and focuses and returns to the viewer most of the energy that normally flows into love. From watching other humans I have to guess that love is a steady longing for the presence and betterment of one or more other humans. If that’s the case then I have to say now that, with the huge exception of my two sons, I doubt I’ve known much human love—not since leaving the shelter of both my parents. I’ve understood sex fairly well, I think. God knows, I’ve enjoyed its varieties, from the howling barnyard buck-and-buckle to the mute conjugation of souls in flesh.
And I gave all I had to an early marriage, honestly all. My wife and the mother of both my sons was and is a splendid creature. She just had far more to give than I needed. It was mostly good and any other ten sane men on the street would have dropped to their knees and begged to get it, her hundred daily proofs of care. But her steady attention had worried me early; and once we were married, it was soon our torment. I hated to keep refusing her overflow. And for three long years I managed to take it. They were the years that brought sons. Then my whole mind balked. This was way too much, and I began to show it in ways too shameful and small to own up to. We hurt each other through six more years, and then we parted with the sad respect of animals too numb to go on fighting. And of course we shared real thanks and amazement for two sturdy boys, each better than us.
Since then my roaming but fastidious erotic curiosity, with my basic dread of loneliness and the standard need to pass my findings along to a fellow human, has won me several long intimacies, with big gifts and receipts. But they’ve yet to compel me to want one woman—or Labrador—steadily. And with that limitation I’ve continued to balk at the final marriage jump, though I’ve known an irregular sequence of helpmates that ranged from wonderful to sweet-but-awful. Maybe the visible outskirts of age will begin to change that.
Anyhow at Juniper I wrote journal letters to my girlfriend and sent her dozens of sketches, more than one of them anatomical, and several finished watercolor landscapes. But the great part of all my various energies went toward painting and my camp routines. In that I wasn’t remarkable. All my age mates groaned but bore the deprivations. And when we all gathered most nights in the counselors’ hut after lights out, I could easily join their railing and joking. We’d sort the day’s take of camper horrors, like the boy who tried to circumcise himself with dull scissors or the boy who hadn’t had a b.m. in three weeks, then was delivered of a nine-pound wonder that two boys recorded on Polaroid film.
And by then we’d honed our imitations of Chief to perfection and had turned to work on Mrs. Chief, a flawless Victorian matron with remorselessly even porcelain teeth and breastworks that might have saved Richmond from Grant. I could also silently monitor their minds and compare them to my own. We all seemed cheerfully horny—mean horny waited till the late 1960s—because we’d been blessed in the same way as most of our contemporaries, even the two all-but-marrieds. We’d never known regular mutual sex and were thus not addicted, not truly desperate, as so many young people plainly are now.
In all it was one of the most likable groups I’ve ever been with. Except for the betrothed two and another few who were going steady, in general they were as loose in the world as me and as fit to be amazed. The highest ambitions, other than my own, were held by the man from Yale—Kevin Hawser—and by a would-be lawyer from Wake Forest, Possum Walters. Otherwise they were politely unexceptional, without ambition but with a vague confidence in working for their fathers or fathers-in-law or simply throwing themselves on the mercy of the open market in a floodtime of easy employment.
To the passing eye, I was very much like them. In only one visible way was I conspicuous, my drawing and painting. They liked to watch me draw. Any sidewalk incompetent can pull a small crowd in a city. And at Juniper wherever I sat with my paper and board, I soon had a huddle of whispering watchers. They enjoyed the small thrill I also enjoy when I stumble on a competent public artist. They were spying on what all such spies think of as a splendid magic, “Look, he’s making another world.” That far, they’re right, though it’s easier than they think. As I mentioned, you only need to watch, then let your hand do exactly what your mind tells it. Eventually one of the bystanders at camp would say “Could you draw me, if you wanted to?” And when I said “If I wanted to,” they would laugh and begin to melt away.
Like most artists of any description, I quickly learned how to build my own solitude and concentration, no matter who stood at my shoulder. And that became another wide gulf between me and the world. Most people are all too ready to be jostled. Their work is something they’re longing to quit. Wherever I’ve taught, I’ve taught that first—the power and joy of oneness, solitude. And for the first three weeks at Juniper, I took my class on walks around the campground, sketching anything and everything.
I’d set one boy to one object. I’d point Chip to a box turtle found in the path; I’d assign Willie to Mrs. Chief’s morning glories and Jeff to her old blind collie. Like anywhere else in unroofed nature, the subjects were endless. Take the brown still lake in early morning; guess the mind of this bird fishing in the shallows here, those rocks that mimic every known shape and form, your neighbor’s face or the Smoky range in the western distance. That, God knows, was grand as the stride of the young Norse gods into Odin’s Valhalla and far more surely immortal in strength. Boys can laugh at anything nearly. But I never heard one of mine laugh at
the Smokies.
In the fourth week of the first session, I grounded the class with me on the west side of the crafts cabin. And while they made what they could, in watercolor and pastels, of the ten thousand values of green and gray between us and the western horizon, I began the painting I’d been led to do. No voices in the night, don’t worry. But I do mean led. As I sketched and fiddled in search of a bigger subject, my mind’s eye kept showing me that wide west range. You might say that I’d have had to be blind to choose anything else. But there were stunning views to the south—even more dramatic peaks and crags, including the one with the prayer circle—and the whole eastward sweep of camp, on up past my own cabin into taller and thicker trees, was one immense green breast.
What led me to the long horizontal west range was my growing sense that the line itself was a calligraphed sentence. Those hazy hard peaks on a harder blue sky. It was some coded combination of meanings that, if ever deciphered, would free mankind and forever reward us. I had few illusions of cracking the code. But as late as that summer, I did believe that if I could transfer the line to canvas and set all patient watchers to work on the task of translation, what grace might I not set loose in the world?
I didn’t mean it, not that flatfootedly anyhow. I was splendidly and crazily fervent, but even that summer I knew the world better than to tell it my plan to save its soul. All the same I was as sure then as now that most of the urgent outstanding secrets of this one universe are strewn here before us. They are barely encoded, in faces and things, and are patiently waiting for the witness that will solve them.
It will only take a few human beings—light and persistent, saints and artists—who struggle to master the languages that can finally convey such news to the rest of the species. I’ll leave it at that, I’m sure you’re glad to hear. Few things are more pointless than tries at describing the emotional burden of a visual image to someone who hasn’t already seen the image. You can talk half an hour and wind up with a misty little paragraph that sounds like a Kahlil Gibran reject.
The Tongues of Angels Page 4
