by Howard Bloom
But Jon more than made up for his poetic failings with a mathematical gift that was breathtaking. Plus, his parents seemed to represent my every goal in life. His father had all the warmth of a rock carving on Mount Rushmore. But he was a Harvard grad who headed the law school at the University of Buffalo. And his wife was a Radcliffe alumna with far more than the usual ice-cream-scoop of cerebral neurons. What’s more, she was extremely attractive, warm, always smiling, and—though she didn’t believe in this kind of stuff—could probably heal by the mere laying on of hands.
Jon’s sisters were two of the most gorgeous and vivacious creatures you’ve ever seen. And, to top it all off, the whole family lived on the backside of my block. So, like a barnacle gluing itself to a ship, I made the Hymans my second substitute family.
My immersion in the Hyman homestead left its footprints all over me. It shaped my political attitudes, sculpted my tastes in music (for example, I learned that holding an LP by the edges was an indispensable symbol of intellectual status), and reshaped pieces of me like putty. Except, of course, for my nose, which even with the aid of plastic surgery had proven beyond redemption.
So far, all of this sounds bucolic, doesn’t it? Nothing here to disturb the sheep munching grass in the Western New York countryside thirty miles from my house. But it was, in reality, the raw material for a rather explosive cocktail. To find out why, I’m afraid you will have to read on.
SEIZED BY POETRY
We’re about to hit pay dirt—sex. But first comes something that sex hides within like a termite in the Trojan Horse—meaning.
Yes, believe it or not, this is a book about a quest for meaning. And the manhunt for what’s worth living and thrilling for in this volume would have lacked its compass and its astrolabe without, well, without Galileo Galilei, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, William James, and Albert Einstein. But three other mind-noodlers were crucial to this squirrely Odyssey in pursuit of purpose. All of them were poets.
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You recall that I was fifteen years old and attached like a tattoo to the Hyman household. But another bunch had me in their telescopic sights: the muses. Yes, all nine of these epitomes of gorgeousness who tweaked and twiddled brains from their remote control HQ on Mount Olympus had apparently decided to grab me by the hair. Lord knows, no one else wanted me. And my hair was so shortened by the demon barbers of the 1950s that it wouldn’t have made a convenient handle for anyone else. Like, for example, a real girl. So at fifteen, for reasons utterly unknown, I was seized by poetry. First came the rhyming couplets of A. E. Housman, the man whose sprightly syllables may well have inspired Dr. Seuss.
You’ve probably run across this bit of Housman’s work. And when you did, I hope that your insurance company covered the damages:
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.
Remember that one?
My Housman obsession lasted a year. I wrote an infinitely long piece of poetry of my own in a style influenced by Housman. OK, it was only five pages. But it took twelve months to perfect, and my dad, who had never noticed any of my previous deeds, assuming there were any, loved the poem. I suspect he was the only one to read it.
Then I tripped across a poem almost as long by a woman named Edna St. Vincent Millay. How? It was probably in a big, fat, brown paperback anthology laying in ambush for me in the tan shag rug of my bedroom, disguised as a carnivorous pack of loops of wool. But that anthology became one of my most treasured companions. And it had the guts to do more than merely throw me off balance and threaten to disarrange my nose for the second time.
This book had the gumption to restrict itself to modern poetry. You know the sort, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and other charlatans who refused to put capital letters at the start of their sentences and who exiled commas and periods, forcing them to pair off and become semi-colons in international nuclear agreements or to go to the punctuation purgatory where unwanted apostrophes and occasional flyspecks are tortured by sadistic characters of the Chinese alphabet.
Buried somewhere in mid anthology was a four-page poem by a woman named Edna St. Vincent Millay. She had been sainted by her parents, who were so insensitive to the grief that kids with strange names undergo at the hands of other kids that they named her after a hospital, a hospital that had just saved her uncle’s life—New York’s St. Vincent’s. Millay had written an epic bit of verse when she was an older woman—sixteen years old, a year or two older than me—and living in Maine. Or as Wikipedia puts it, “living in poverty.” Yes, that would be Poverty, Maine. What’s worse, the four-page epic of verse misspelled its own name—“Renascence.”
Renascence purported to be the musings of a young woman in a clearing on a mountain top. She lies face-up in the dirt, grass, and weeds, then looks straight up into the sky. But all she sees as she stares into the heavens is how narrow the space is between the trees on either side, and how claustrophobically small the slice of blue between the sharp-elbowed branches is. She feels cramped, hemmed in. Then she has a strange experience. In her imagination, she leaves her body and travels the world, whiffling through the air without benefit of a single bolt, panel, or Yorkshire-terrier-sized coach seat from Boeing, seeing into the hearts and souls of a man who’s starving in Capri and a hundred passengers going down in a ship at sea. What grabs her attention the most? The sufferings and missteps.
All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.
But that was not exactly how Edna’s words struck me. To me it seemed as if the imagination of her girl in a mountain clearing soars over the world and sees into the radically different emotions and impenetrably alien senses of reality of folks from cultures all over the planet, people who would regard your way of seeing things and mine as exotic and unreal. One way or the other, when the heroine of Renascence returns to her own body, her visual gifts have changed. Her perceptions have expanded. She is still staring at the same small patch of sky. She is still hemmed in by the same aggressive branches and imperialistic trees. But in what she views, she now sees an infinity.
In her words:
The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.
That poem hit like a bus slamming into an oil truck. And it felt familiar. Remember the second rule of science? Look at things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before, then proceed from there? That’s a command to see the infinite in the tiniest of things. Edna St. Vincent Millay said that to accomplish that infinite vision, you have to radically expand your empathic powers. You have to be able
to feel the emotions of people who are insanely different than you are. In fact, you have to immerse yourself in emotional extremes. Reason and logic are not enough. You need to trek into the passions. You have to scuba-dive deep into the abyss of feelings. You must adventure.
Sometimes instructions like these cut to the quick. They restructure your ideals. They rearrange the ground plan of your soul. They insert themselves like malware in your brain. But unlike malware, you welcome the bits of programming inserted by certain key experiences, and they guide you for the rest of your life. That’s what Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence” did for me. And what Millay would soon do for the quests at the heart of The Sixties.
There was yet another piece of poetry rattling around in the dark cave of my skull, a bit of verse that must have been horny as hell. How did I know? It appeared anxious to have sex with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence.” Maybe because Edna was only sixteen. It went like this:
To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour…
That was William Blake, a lunatic in the eighteenth century who swore he saw “God put his head to the window.” Like a baseball smashing through? Or did God just peek, look for naked ladies, and move on? But Blake harvested his lunacies—his visions—to make poetry and pictures. How very William James.
Those two poems grabbed me, from the roots of my nearly scalp-level haircut to the stones in my gizzard. (Do we humans have stones in our gizzards, or is that just chickens? Chickens in our gizzards?) OK, even the dumb clucks in my gizzard were standing on end to these two poems. Which end they stood on, the head or the feet, it was hard to know.
Meanwhile another piece of poetry was trying to worm its way into the dark cave of my skull where it would be safe from the chickens. And, boy, did it have a hard time. My English teacher was determined to hammer T. S. Eliot into us. Eliot’s poems—in particular “The Wasteland” and the “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—appeared to me to be deliberate frauds. Eliot’s technique, I was convinced, was to construct impossible-to-understand poems, poems that were incomprehensible for a good reason: they had nothing to say. But Eliot draped that nothing in so many words of Greek and Latin, and so many references to the canon of English Literature that they conned you. If you confessed that you didn’t understand Eliot, you revealed yourself as stupid and folks edged away from you at cocktail parties. Whatever cocktail parties were—celebratory aggregations of alcoholic roosters? But if you said that T. S. Eliot was brilliant, everyone thought you were smart.
Eliot, I was convinced, was using the emperor’s new clothes strategy to make himself appear to be a genius. He was, I was certain, the most sophisticated tailor of invisible costumes on seven continents. Or the most fraudulent bard. But to level my accusations of charlatanism and to do it believably, I had to read Eliot’s poems. Over and over and over again. And that wasn’t easy.
The bigger the investment of time you make in something, the more it holds you and won’t let go. And the more you hold on to it.
One day I dipped into a twenty-five-year-old book called Axel’s Castle by Edmund Wilson, a critic whose insights had influenced folks like F. Scott Fitzgerald. And in two meager paragraphs, Wilson made Eliot’s meaning clear. Clear as one of those glass walls you occasionally try to walk through, convinced that they aren’t there. Or that I occasionally try to walk through.
Thanks to Wilson, one of Eliot’s poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” turned into what Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence” had recently become—a personal anthem, a wake-up call, a motto posted on the inside of my forehead so my cerebral cortex could see it every morning when it woke up. What was Prufrock’s message? Why was it so galvanizing? And why would it be essential to the soul of an era that had not yet arrived…The Sixties?
You have a limited amount of life energy, said T. S. Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” You also have a limited amount of time. And you have an inner sense of the heroic, of the things that you will someday do to become the you that you have always imagined yourself to be. You have an inner sense of the things that would make people of the opposite sex, in particular, look up to you. And possibly even lust for you. But you put those heroic deeds off. You procrastinate. You tell yourself that there will be time in the future to accomplish them. Instead, you do the things that are easiest for you. You do small, ordinary things. Then you wake up one day and realize that it’s too late. You no longer have the strength or the time to go after your real goals in life. The result? You lead a pathetic, inconsequential existence.
The bottom line? If you have something important to do, something heroic, something you feel will define you, begin it now. Today. Here’s a bit of how Eliot put it. If you don’t adventure, you wake up one day and realize that:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old…I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
…We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
From these three poems emerged a mission. To expand your ability to see the infinite in the smallest things, you must mount safaris into every outlandish extreme of human emotion, every strange twist of alien culture. You must undertake scientific expeditions into the most overlooked but important corners of the human experience. You must adventure! And you must start these adventures in the fringe and beyond it today. Now.
As you’re about to see, these three poems were more than just words to me. I would act on them. Over and over again. And the results would be as maniacal as the visions of William Blake. What’s more, those three poems would be essential to the spirit of The Sixties.
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Then came yet another piece of literature, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which had been published when I was fourteen. I was late to read it. By the time I got around to it, it was two years old…and I was sixteen. But it advocated the very heroic deed that I needed—grabbing whatever internal-combustion-engine vehicle you could get your hands on and vrooming from New York State to California. So I told my parents I was going to drop out of high school. In my junior year. What was my grand goal? I would get on a motorcycle and cross the continent, exposing myself to random escapades. T. S. Eliot and Edna St. Vincent Millay, I was certain, would have been proud.
There were only, well, umm, two or three problems.
I didn’t own a motorcycle and the funds from my bar mitzvah, $315, wouldn’t allow me to buy one.
I had no idea of how to ride a motorcycle. And I was the only person my age in the entire city of Buffalo, New York, without a driver’s license.
Oh, and one more thing. Without a lot of coaching from gas station attendants, I had no idea of which direction was west.
My parents, in desperation, asked for the aid of my English teacher, the man responsible for pouring T. S. Eliot into my head. This august, New England–born-and-raised pedagogue approved of my plan of dropping out of eleventh grade, but he had a bet
ter idea than the motorcycle. An idea that didn’t require a driver’s license. He would arrange a stint for me in a lumberjack camp in Oregon.
The thought of all that armpit sweat made me treesick. So I called off my plans for cross country adventure. Temporarily. As you will see.
However, “Renascence” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” became so urgent to me that I would go to Buffalo’s only jazz hangout late at night, and wait until the musicians came in after their gigs at weddings or nightclubs and jammed for their own benefit until they were exhausted. Then I would go onstage reciting these poems to the three people still left in the audience. In fact, I would recite them to anyone who would listen.
Why was I reading these poems at the top of my lungs to anyone willing to endure them? It would take me thirty years to figure that out. But here’s the conclusion: I wanted to galvanize others. To wake them up. To prod them into action. That was the easy part. But here’s the flipside that it took me forever to understand: the person I needed to wake up the most was…me.
I would follow these poems’ dictates for the rest of my life. And thanks to those three pieces of verse, a very strange life it would be.
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One more tiny incident would carry me, barreling like a Mad Max dune buggy, toward the infinite in the tiniest of things, not to mention toward the Olympian plateaus and dirt roads in the sky, the contrails of the gods inside.
Park School had a brilliant set up, a structure that made room for more than just the gorgeous kids whose looks and Pontiac convertibles made the knees of the school’s maidens buckle and their wells of anticipation grow moist and ravenous. It worked like this. The most popular male in a class would be voted class president. The second most popular would be voted vice president. The most popular Jew would be voted class treasurer. And the most popular girl would be voted class secretary. Then all four of them would do nothing for the rest of the semester. At least nothing pertaining to their duties. What they did on dates was still beyond me.
But during the first week of classes, we were told that in October the school would have a fair to raise money. OK, sounds good. Well, think again. We’d be divided into teams of eight. Each team would have to conceive a booth for the fair. A booth whose amusements folks would pay genuine, real, green, full-faith-and-credit-of-the-the-United-States-backed money to experience. So our first week of school, eight of us were locked in a room to conceive some dynamite form of sure-fire entertainment. Yes, seven normal, healthy, reasonably good looking kids. And me. Now a strange thing happens when you get a group of popular, rambunctious, well-adjusted, normal kids into a room to accomplish a goal: they are immobilized. Yes, they are stumped, stomped, stymied, and speechless. Not to mention just a tad humiliated. Why? When it comes to accomplishing something more than buying a case of beer and an illegal bottle of scotch or two, they don’t have a clue.
