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Andre Masson, Metamorphosis of the Lovers, 1939
My working-class neighborhood in South Worcester was a great place to
grow up—if your interests were such things as baseball, basketball, bike
riding, tree and railroad bridge climbing, kick the can, fighting, trespassing,
and urban spelunking. Unless it rained, my friends and I spent most of our
time outdoors. It was not, however, the best place for a budding avant
-gardist. By the time I graduated high school, I had become aware of just
how limited I was, like the city that produced me, a city I would only years
later come to love.
If you had a car, you could drive from my neighborhood to Boston in an
hour. I didn't have a car, however. I didn't take Route Nine. I went by way
of the abyss. I worked eight hours a day as a janitor at the Worcester
Telegram & Gazette, cleaning ink off all the presses, and also as a
counsellor at the Worcester Crisis Center, learning to treat the problems of
heroin addicts and would be suicides as being almost as important my own.
I then would spend most of my free time at the Clark University Library,
going stack by stack in my search for any trace of the Philosopher's Stone.
An abyss had opened, and I entered it. We became good friends, more or
less, not that I was presented with any other option. In the two years after
high school, I chose to act as my harshest critic. There was lots of catching
up to do. To do something once was to do it many times. I saw, I heard, I
was led, I learned a lot, but each small gain felt deliberate and laborious.
And then, in September, 1974, when I moved to Boston to go to art school,
my self-imposed atonement came suddenly to an end, as though I had
closed the book that I was reading with a snap. Don't ask for what crime I
had been sentenced to atone. A kind of antigravity took over when I
stepped from the Greyhound bus. The top of my head flew off. The days
appeared to physically grow brighter. The sun moved closer to the Earth. I
was as happy as one of the roaches that scurried in my 92 dollars-per
-month apartment.
Did my kitchen not have a stove? Did water leaking from my ceiling
destroy a dozen drawings? Was my wallpaper starting to fall off? Did the
mice make so much noise that they kept me up at night? What of it? Such
hardships fit my definition of adventure. So as not to grow too comfortable,
a few days per week I would add to these hardships by sleeping on the floor
. In Worcester, I had put my shoulder against an almost immovable wheel.
In Boston, in search of the later-day descendants of Bohemia, on the cusp
of a cultural moment that I had not yet discovered, not the effort but the
sense of difficulty disappeared.
I had intended to rent an apartment a few blocks from my school.
Hopelessly ignorant of the city, I ended up a mile away. What luck was
mine! My location was a perfect one, across the street from the
Northeastern University Library, whose books would gladly welcome me
when I fled from my apartment. Was this place the result of a series of
wrong turns? No. I had accepted Baudelaire's invitation to go with him on a
voyage. I had gone where the Old Ones sent me. I was where I was meant
to be. If the most important changes are internal, having to do with one's
subtle relationship to events, then there are also times when outer changes
are essential, when one would die inside without them. These outer
changes then shift the balance between the subject and the object, so that
events begin to articulate the psyche, so that the psyche appears to be
present in the most random of events.
Brian George, The Enigma of the Calendar, pictogram, 2002
So: one Sunday night, having finished all of my art school projects for the
weekend, I decided to check out a writers workshop held at the Widener
Library at Harvard. There, I met two poets, Jack Kimball and Don
Quatrale, who invited me to a poets' gathering to be held on Joy Street on
Beacon Hill at 6:00 the following night. My role: just being in a place, and
later on: a nod of assent. Jack said, "Your work is young, but there are signs
pointing to some future breakthrough into vision." "Oh?" I responded,
"How nice." Should I interpret Jack's analysis as rude? It was a close call,
and I almost didn't go.
A hair's breadth of a difference separates the right from the wrong action.
We may reasonably shame the actor for not making perfect choices, yet
timidity may be the most important sin. One life stops; another life begins,
at one and the same moment of remembrance. We do not know what we
know. Yet it is possible that our ignorance is also a non-issue. The
contraption once built by the oracle runs as smoothly as a broken clock.
Upon opening my eyes, I found that I was standing in front of a Second
Empire townhouse. Joy Street. Number 23. (This was back when you didn't
have to be a millionaire to live in a rundown apartment on Beacon Hill.) At
6:00, I rang the bell and slowly climbed the stairs. I knocked on the door, it
opened, and a cloud of incense smoke poured out. Will Bennett, wearing a
bath towel and eating a hotdog, explained that he was actually a
macrobiotic vegetarian. (Such was the lure of the proto-punk scene that it
had infected his until then pure beliefs.) At 8:00, the poets started to
trickle in. I mostly watched. When I did attempt to speak, my comments
would be met with silence, and vaguely paranoid glances would be flashed
my way. Since I had recently cut my hair short when most men in such
circles still wore it long, I was regarded as a possible narc or at best an MIT
nerd.
Victor Brauner, The Fashion, 1937
The group read, contributed lines to spontaneous poems, made "exquisite
corpse" drawings, and spoke of Lautreamont and Rimbaud and de Chirico
and Ernst and Vallejo and Lamantia, all of whom were influences, all of
whom I loved. Finally, at 2:30 a.m., I was able to take advantage of a quiet
moment to read several of my pieces. The themes of my not especially good
poetry were archetypal. My reading style was eccentric, a bit like Tibetan
chanting. It had evolved during those two years of near solitude in
Worcester, and it did not resemble any of the current styles of performing
poetry. It had been known to scare people.
I read one piece without incident, but a minute or so into the second piece,
something unexpected happened. Many group members started to laugh,
hysterically, as they rolled around on the floor. They slapped the arms of
their chairs, shrieking. They hooted and barked. They threw pillows around
the room. Should I be offended? Did they hate the work? As it turned out,
the exact opposite was true. They were pleased that first impressions could
prove to be so wrong. Many in this group were to remain my friends for the
next 10 or 15 years. Chance: the displaced effect of a cause that we have
long ago forgotten. Thus "accident" may not be different from "intent."
In an earlier draft of this essay, I had listed the names of all the people at
this event. I have edited these out. There is no particular reason that the
reader should care about these people or share my sense of why they are
important. None are famous. A few have won prizes. A few had started
small literary magazines, back when there were such things and poets
gathered at bookstores to discuss them, and a few are still well known in
small literary circles today. I was surprised, however, to find how limited a
presence the majority of them have on the internet. I doubt that any I'm
not aware of have spent time searching for me. Most are now strangers.
How far away they are—stylistically, geographically, metaphysically. They
are as distant from me as they were before we had ever met, and yet,
without them, I would be living in an altogether different world. If my story
had not led me to that cloud-filled room in a Second-Empire townhouse,
and if the third-floor door had not been opened by an almost naked
vegetarian eating a hotdog, then I would not be who and what I am. I would
not be writing what I write, and I would never have met you, my reader,
however far away you are. Even now, I am grateful. I gasp with relief.
Since 2007, I have been out of touch with Jack Kimball. We had a pleasant
talk on the phone. Don Quatrale passed away in the early 1990s. I feel
guilty. I don't know the exact date.
Max Ernst, Loplop Introduces Loplop, 1930
In five thousand or so years, some avian monk may compile a catalogue of
all of the obscure writers of our era. By then, if all goes well, if there are
lands whose labs have managed to peek above the ocean, if a derelict
reactor becomes the Virgin Mother to New Humans, if we somehow learn
to live on seeds and sulfur and mercury, if a homeopathic distillation of
cursed mummy wrappings becomes the drug of choice, our sonic
technology may be able to track the spin of each electron in the universe.
We may be able to assess, objectively, the stature of each writer and the
importance of each friend. The synchronicities that drew me to my band of
bohemian catalysts may then reveal themselves in all of their perfection.
On a cold day, squinting, the avian monk will then reunite my circle with a
footnote.
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