EXISTENCE IS A VAST BLUNDER. I’M OK WITH THAT.
I remember the fallen giant hulk of a tree from a hurricane and how we scampered and crawled across that druidic, earth-smelling thing before chainsaws were common. It was cut down by hand, and we had days to be with it. I recall how time was less hurried, how before TV I went to the library or busied myself with all kinds of things to do, like playing with a cap gun. I had no idea I was in a troubled family or that we were poor or lower (very lower) middle class. I lived an existence as a child, as I look back, that had no intentionality to it. What I am feeling is that what I knew of my limited world was fed to me in pieces, tesserae, haphazardly at that, and I had no inner apparatus to make feeling or sense of it. The Era of Benign Neglect was forming. Moreover, I feel I was left to my own devices and not engaged – all model making I did alone. And so years later, as I see it, self-sufficiency became a defense I devised to defend against my feeling of being bereft – as well as empty.
Even the cold moon is given the dignity of being bombarded by meteors. I cannot recall any craters made by mother and father. I grew up in a postwar period in which the shock of the death camps was not yet metabolized, nor the term “Holocaust” common to all. Similarly, I grew up stunned, without knowledge of this, that is, who I was. I was not acted upon. The lowly pebble in a stream experiences abrasions. I associate to those awful suburban homes of yore that have a fiberglass doe on their lawns or a few ducks, cut-out figures trying to give the illusion of forest creatures. I imagine myself cut-out from a child’s play book with a tab at the bottom of my feet. Press tab back and set on table. I was a “model” son. When you are numb, you create no fuss…much ado about nothing.
The thread that runs through all these shards is that essentially I was a kind of puppet essentially manipulated by older puppets, but puppets themselves. I cannot attribute malice to them, for they were so deadly conditioned as souls.
As a child I liked Al Jolson. Once I had “performed” in front of my grandmother, uncles and aunts, lip synching from the blue phonograph as Jolson warbled “April Showers.” I remember – at, 7, 8, or 9 – having my father blacken cork by burning it, then coloring my face so I’d sing in blackface – my relatives, on my father’s side had been grade C performers in Vaudeville. I was given a top hat and other paraphernalia and I went into the living room and did 15 minutes of Charlie McCarthy. I cringe at what I was subjected to. At the time it was very normal and I probably liked it. You should have seen my Gene Kelly. Whew!
It was as if a monstrous hand reached beneath my shirt and installed itself into my back and broke through the musculature until it grabbed my heart and associated organs and manipulated my being, as I moved arms, legs, mouth and torso at the behest of a violent intruder.
I am convinced that I was invaded before 5 or 6 so that before the end of the first decade of life I had been soul murdered.
I lived a marionette’s existence. Any time I felt, questioned or moved toward less numbness, my nose grew and my penis shortened.
I am well aware of how I was shut down and I am still working on moving out like a turtle, away from that horror to what Hemingway called, “A clean, well-lighted place.”
I ransack my past, especially my two summers in Woodstock, for each morsel of freedom attained. Woodstock, for me, is time. There is a compelling gravity to the past and it holds us in trance largely because it is known. I could return right now to the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, get off at Coney Island Avenue, go up to Brighton Beach Avenue, now Little Odessa, hang a left and then turn into Brighton 2nd Street. I’d walk this rectangular block 62 years ago that had an open lot cut into it, like the gap between two front teeth, now congested with solid brick and ill-humored homes. There were varied walkways, byways and lanes that I still vividly recall. I remember a fascinating pussy willow tree that heralded the beginning of a short lane. Decades ago I returned to browse through its memorabilia only to return home in a confused stated, as if I had not gone home again. I look back now and I am not sure if I actually made that journey, a kind of fugue state. I am feeling I would like to go home again, although the attraction is really to touch home base, secure the run.
All my past is like LePage’s glue, the rubber-nippled bottle of my childhood that I figuratively nursed on. The past is not necessarily good or safe, select an adjective, but it has familiarity, security and most of all, constancy. A rare quality of “thereness” suffuses the past, which is probably much more intense than the life we live now in the present. To secure constancy in the present is to be free, as Krishnamurti said, from the known.
