Saturday, April 26, 2008
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Galen Green
msmth2210@aol.com
mythoklast@mailstation.com
(816) 807-4957 (voice mail)
Wednesday
November 7, 2007
(the late Marie Curie's
140th birthday)
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When I Close My Eyes, I Can See . . . . .
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"I am constantly struck by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed -- personally and intimately -- to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago."
-- Stephen Greenblatt (author of Will in the World [2004] and founder of the school of literary criticism called New Historicism, which is the idea that the only way to really understand a work of art is to examine everything that was going on in the world of the artist at the time the work of art was created.)
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Dear Shannon (& Co.),
When I close my eyes, I can see our old neighborhood, nestled there in what was then the northeast corner of Wichita, Kansas, there in the middle of the so-called "Cold War," there on that gentle, almost imperceptible slope, downward from its crest along Gentry Drive where your family lived, across Fairmount Park where so much of our becoming took place, across the aptly named Hillside to North Lorraine where Margaret & Harry & Lois & Kevin & I lived in our dinky gray hovel, and where that lovely antique fortress of a red brick schoolhouse named "Fairmount" rose up to mold to its will the wet clay for our fresh little heathen selves, and on downward, ever so gradually toward the west to those rickety neighborhoods where Wichita's African-American families found themselves ghettoized back then, and on across the haunted rail yards, the tall white grain elevators, the mysterious, fragrant, glowing petroleum refinery, the pungent, mooing cattle pens, and on across Broadway (Highway 81), on down to the muddy banks of the Arkansas River, which connected us even then in my boyish imagination to the mighty Mississippi and thus to the vast and mighty oceans of the whole wide world.
Remember the swimming pool at Fairmount Park where so many of us kids in the 1950’s first learned to hold our breath and float and kick! kick! kick! and cup our little hands to propel our little bodies forward, and then bake in the midday summer sun on the concrete banks before jumping back into that icy water?
When I close my eyes, I can see that Fairmount Park shelter house on a sweltering summer's afternoon, with all its windows open wide and all its fans turned up on "high," as we kids stand around in a circle where the day-camp counselor is leading us in a rousing chorus of: "Do your ears hang low? Do they wobble to and fro? Can you tie them in a knot? Can you tie them in a bow?" -- etc. . . and I can somewhat see the supposedly Native American style "comb holder" I made for my father out of brightly colored plastic “bison sinews” and strips of extremely low-grade pre-cut little rectangles of rawhide, there in the day-camp crafts program, artfully crafted to keep our dutiful mothers relatively sane. (In the case of my adoptive mother Margaret, this formula proved only partially effective. But that's another story for another day.)
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Remember the skies above Wichita in the 1950's & '60's -- how they were forever buzzing, humming, roaring with aircraft of every size, shape and description? Being of the male persuasion, naturally what impressed me most were the Air Force jets; and of those, the huge, silver, lumbering B-47's and B-52's which I knew my daddy had helped to build "out at the plant," which was his name for the sprawling Boeing Aircraft facility adjacent to McConnell Air Force Base, way off in the southeast corner of the city, where Harry worked as a toolmaker from the summer before Pearl Harbor until sometime during my freshman year at Wichita State.
As has already been noted, our childhood -- yours and mine -- overlapped the middle part of the so-called "Cold War" -- the height of the Cold War, as historians and journalists now refer to it. But, besides these ubiquitous military jets, the skies above Wichita seemed to be ceaselessly humming, sputtering, whining, whirring, moaning . . . with the engines of other airplanes, put together by other daddies who worked at factories with names like Beech and Cessna. Wichita, back then, had been dubbed "The Air Capital of the World," so that I suppose any child of either gender would have found the never-ending air show high above our heads a source of constant distraction, if not exactly entertainment.
When I close my eyes, I can see the sidewalk where I walked to school five mornings a week, strewn with what, back then, we called "IBM punch cards" (because we were aware of only one computer company and naively believed them to do only one thing, which was to process by the billions these mysterious punch cards, approximately the size and shape of a Series E United States Savings Bond, with the encoded data of each card rendered as a series of tiny rectangular perforations approximately the size and shape of those notorious Florida "chads" which played such an historically memorable role in the 2000 Presidential (Gore v. Bush) counter-election. Never having actually touched a computer punch card before, I found them utterly fascinating and began picking up as many as I could carry, until my fascination wore thin.
As it turned out (And please correct me if I'm wrong about this.), the scatter of techno-litter I can still see today, when I close my eyes, was reportedly part of some Top Secret Cold War military experiment. That's all anyone ever made known to me; and even that may have been totally bogus. As I recall, we good citizens of Wichita were asked to turn in any of these cards that we found. I don't remember if we were to leave them in our mailboxes for our letter carrier or take them to school and give them to our teacher. It was all extremely vague to me, at the age of 6 or 7. Does any of this ring a bell? My hindsighted guess is that it may have had something to do with wind-drift patterns and potential threats of chemical terrorism -- or that the megalomaniacal paranoids in the military community just wanted to see if we'd actually do what they told us to do.
But while we're in that "neighborhood": Do you remember those metal dog tags we all wore on chains around our necks for several years in the mid-1950's? Was that a nationwide project or merely local? I recall having it emphasized to me on innumerable occasions that, because of the presence of McConnell AFB and of Boeing Aircraft and of the ICBM silos in the immediate vicinity, our fair city was considered to be a prime military target, in the event (Heavens forefend!) that World War III were to break out. Therefore, when Miss Robertson (or Mrs. James or whomever) told our class that the dog tags were to help the police find us if we got lost (the way I did, when trying to find my way back home after walking you home one afternoon) . . . when the teacher fed us that line, the only image which came to my geopolitically focused young mind was of all our hopeful little bodies burnt to a crisp in a thermonuclear attack launched by the Soviet Union, with nothing but our blacked little skeletons and those nifty metal dog tags remaining. But, given my father's vividly vocal obsession with biblical apocalypse, this image was, for me, even at the age of 7, neither new nor especially horrifying.
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But enough (for the time being) about the Cold War component to our childhood in Wichita. Let me close my weary old Irish turtle eyes once again and see what else I can see this time. Ah, yes! There's a more pleasant image! Remember the Pied Piper Bookstore? Of course you do! A couple of doors south of the broadcasting studio of the university's radio station, KMUW, just off 17th Street on Fairmount. No brief description of the Pied Piper could possibly do it justice. It was, of course, "housed" literally in what had been someone's tiny wood-frame house, which actually had, if I recall correctly, a basement, though I don't recall ever being allowed to go down there. The Pied Piper was, of course, on the surface of it, just another used bookstore, a vanishing breed here in 21st century America. But to a hungry-minded little boy growing up in a fairly dull Midwestern city during the Eisenhower years, it was a feast of curiosities and of satisfactions for my curiosities.
When I close my eyes, I can see the inside of the Pied Piper Bookstore as it appeared to me that very first time Steve Sowards (who else!) took me there for my initiatory tour and to introduce me to the owner/proprietor, Jack Whitesell, and his dozen or so cats who lounged around amidst the dusty old books and periodicals or sunned themselves in the windows or nursed a new litter of kittens in the some dark corner, clear at the back of the store, between the moldering boxes of ancient National Geographics and Pre-World War II Life Magazines. Steve & I would have been in the 4th or 5th grade at Fairmount Elementary at the time.
Just in case you never had the pleasure of hanging out for an hour or two in the Pied Piper (way back before Jack finally managed to smoke himself to death sometime in the late 1970's and the store was closed down) I'll describe it for you simply as a very loosely organized jumble of relatively low-quality books and magazines which nobody much wanted but which Jack's loyal customer base of several hundred of us would buy from, every now and then, as much for the sake of pity and/or solidarity as anything. Beneath its tobacco-smoke- cat-urine- moldy-paper- -wreaking surface, the Pied Piper was, at heart, about its spirit and atmosphere, more than about any given element of its molecular reality. I suspect that it stood for an imaginary bohemian zeitgeist which its most loyal patrons (Galen Green foremost among them, from 1959 till 1976 or so) longed to inhabit as a temporary escape from Wichita's more dominant zeitgeists such as the aforementioned bastions of America's military-industrial complex or "Cowtown" or that so-called "amusement park" ironically named "Joyland."
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To be continued . . .
Galen
November 12, 2007
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P.S.
Hello Shannon –
Received your very welcome note this morning, just as I was about to send this fifth installment off to you (& yours). Will make every effort to respond in my sixth installment to your most recent thoughts. Thanks so much for taking the time to connect. And thanks again for being exactly the “audience” I need to impel me to write down these reminiscences which I should have recorded long ago. Please feel free to share them with Chris, Steve, etc; as I’m sure you can tell they are, ultimately, intended for a more general audience. Incidentally: from Nov. 16th thru the 26th, my personal schedule will be a bit crazy, so please e-mail anything during that period to both the e-mail addresses at the top of this installment. (Thanks!) Meanwhile, here are the words to a song I wrote back in 1986, in that cemetery on what used to be the northeast corner of Hillside & Kellogg, before they “improved” it. It was near the house at 621 S. Lorraine, which we moved to in the summer of 1965. The song itself could be said, I suppose, to be about a far more general overview of that thing called “the old neighborhood.” Wichita is a stranger to me now. We haven’t been back there since 2002; and before that, not since I moved here after Margaret’s death in 1990 – except for an hour or two when driving through. Do you still have ties there?
Will write more soon, God willing. Enjoy the song. Let me know how you’re doing? Until next time, stay well.
Happy Thanksgiving,
Galen
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IN THE CEMETERY ABOVE THE INTERSTATE
As I walk amidst the human debris of my city,
These gravestones fail to dazzle my blood.
But a sharp wind from Milwaukee does,
And so I choose to muzzle
Myself with my collar turned up, still I wince,
As I squint out over these labels I am.
December’s bright wind grows intense.
Upon my face, here among the damned.
Once, lost tribes walked in frazzle of genocide,
Here, where immense engines rise and fall and sizzle
Their songs to sing our circumstance.
The far horizon, like a clam of earth and sky,
Seals around the sticky slime of life.
I look out at them, these driven dead,
Hell-bent for nooky.
My tearing eyes take in each ounce of landscape,
Here where the worn-out lacky
That was my father makes perfect sense,
Inside this earth, this fortune cookie.
These pickled corpses cannot guzzle
Another drop of wind or whim,
For they have felt the final fizzle
Snuff out their fuses, sans “BLAM!”
These granite markers, cold and numb,
Endure this wind, this flow, this rinse
Of human madness and the slam
Of storm and war and arrogance.
I wish I had a cup of saki
To warm my hands and light my nozzle.
For this is the weather for playing hockey
To the tune of winter’s icy chisel.
A pine tree sways like a furry lance.
The yellow grass is a sea of bristles.
Far off, the city hums, and hence,
I think of you. This brief epistle
I share with you like a Christmas ham
Is meant to bring you peace when we
Are far apart in Vietnam
Or any hell from which we might wish to be set free.
Words and Music by Galen Green c 1986
Performed on Peasant Cantata c 2003
Excerpted here from The Toolmaker’s Other Son
(rough draft copyright 2005 by Galen Green)
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Galen Green
mythoklast@mailstation.com
msmith2210@aol.com
Saturday
November 24, 2007
(my late grandmother,
Phoebe Evans McCall's
127th birthday)
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Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon
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oh if we knew
if we knew what we needed if we even knew
the stars would look to us to guide them
-- W. S. Merwin, from "The Different Stars" (from The Carrier of Ladders; 1970)
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When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
-- from King Lear (Act iv, scene vi) by Wm. Shakespeare
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Dear Shannon (& Co.),
If I might just possibly possess any helpful insights worth passing along to future generations, they're all going to be drawn, by definition and of necessity, from the bittersweet well of what it's been to be me. In this sense, what teacher, writer or grandparent can, after all, ever hope to wholly escape the taint of subjectivity? What it's been like to be me has been to travel, like any number of ancient mariners (Odysseus being my personal favorite among them), from island to island, from foreign place to foreign place, learning what I could along the way. This past summer and fall, I finally got around to reading The Education of Henry Adams , a book so nice I read it twice. And while neither of my grandfathers happened to have been President of the United States, nor any of my great-grandfathers to have been a signer of The Declaration of Independence; and while my own Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon has not been as well-financed nor as impressively peopled as was that of Henry Adams (1838 -- 1918), I couldn't help being struck by a handful of significant parallels between the process of his education and that of my own education. Foremost among these parallels would have to be the stark contrast between our so-called "formal" and "informal" education. In Henry Adams' case, the irony which inheres in this contrast pulses through every chapter of his chronicle to become, in the final analysis, one of the dominant themes in The Education of Henry Adams, and perhaps most inescapably in the title itself,
as though Adams were smiling at the reader from the corner of each page, saying to us: "Oh! Did you think that this was going to be about my schooling? Well, surprise!"
Thus, as you'd probably imagine, The Education of Henry Adams (published posthumously), like the education of Galen Green, turns out to have been a journey fraught with serendipity. Likewise, both his education and mine involve a considerable amount of self-education, i.e. autodidacticism.
Somewhere in his hefty classic, Adams even comes right out and says that (to paraphrase here) most of the burden of learning is in learning how to learn. For most human beings, living in most times and places and under most circumstances, learning how to learn translates as learning how to teach oneself.
So, if autodidacticism is such a nearly universal human experience, then why do we hear so little about it, here in the America of The Roaring Zeros? That's a very good question.
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”Live a little. Write a little. Live a little. Write a little. Live, write. Live, write. (Rinse & repeat?)" That sounds a lot less pretentious than my comparing my autodidactical travelogue to the majestically mythical voyages, shipwrecks and heroic deeds of someone like Odysseus -- or, for that matter, to the Boston Brahmin, first-class, five-star, Henry Jamesish, aristocratic, genteel "education" of someone like Henry Adams.
I purchased a used book a year or so ago for a quarter (25 cents, American) entitled Blackberry Winter (My Early Years) by Margaret Mead (Wm. Morrow, 1972; 351 pages; hardcover). The Red Bridge Branch of the Mid-continent Public Library here in Kansas City was discarding it, most likely for lack of interest. I'd thumbed through it briefly then shelved it for future reference. It's been gathering dust in our office library at home ever since. Until last night. After I'd had a chance to read over what I'd written here yesterday, it "dawned on me" (as my late mother, Margaret, used to say) that the time had come for me to take down my dog-eared copy of Mead's memoir and revisit some of the immense admiration I'd felt for her back in the early 1970's, when she was at the sunset of her life and career and I as just beginning to mosey into the noonday of mine.
Not that I'm any kind of expert on Margaret Mead (1901 -- 1978); I'm not. I can guarantee you that the most mediocre second-year Cultural Anthropology major at the most third-rate of America's state universities probably knows ten times as much about Mead and her work as I ever will. That's mostly because Cultural Anthropology, strictly speaking, is not my "field." Nevertheless, I've found myself inspired and energized by Mead, her writing, her vigorous mind and vibrant imagination, and even her admittedly Gerry-rigged methodology, throughout the entirety of my own checkered career. And if I had adequate time to paint for you a detailed canvas of my own life and work in the 40 years since you and I graduated from high school there in Wichita, Kansas in 1967, I suspect that you'd understand in fairly short order the metaphorical parallels between Mead's "process" and mine.
Even so, I myself can easily understand how any comparison between my career and that of the illustrious Dr. Margaret Mead might strike most folks as laughable -- and even delusional . . . until they allowed themselves to get close enough to actually look inside the thing -- that thing being my own unique and fruitful Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon. Throughout her career, Dr. Mead traveled to many exotic places, encountered and studied a number of previously underdocumented (or misdocumented) cultural patterns and survived to tell about it -- as have I. Where both she and I have run into the troublesome teeth and claws of monstrous theocratic disapproval has been to do with the taboo factor. To put it much more simply that "it" deserves to be put: Most of the cultural patterns which both Margaret Mead and I survived to tell about turned out not to be what the powers that be (and the stooges of the powers that be) WANTED for us to have learned. Both her field notes and mine contained a bit too much inconvenient truth.
This is, of course, one of the main reasons why The Autodidactikon which is the natural habitat of any investigative journalist, cultural anthropologist or mythoklastic therapist worth his or her salt, has lost favor with "the academy;" inconvenient truth, taboo truth, scientifically verifiable truth, etc . . . are the inevitable products of any clear-minded honest inquiry. But exactly what, you may be asking, do I mean by The Autodidactikon?
Because it is a construct, a useful fiction, a metaphor, existing in the imagination (albeit, the most rational realms of the imagination), let's settle, for now, on the following functional definition: The Autodidactikon is that otherwise indefinable passageway through which every human creature voyages in his or her (hopefully lifelong) process of inviting the world, nature, the cosmos, etc. to teach him or her whatever is worth knowing. Another way of putting it might be to say that The Autodidactikon is that inextricably interwoven braid of modes, means, and media whereby we teach ourselves "stuff," i.e. wherewith we do autodidacticism.
I personally imagine The Autodidactikon to be both (and inexplicably simultaneously) a marvelous machine, like the fabled orgasmatron and a bright azure sea over which I voyage from shipwreck to shipwreck -- the total phantasmagorical experience of which I nickname "wisdom."
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I spoke earlier of my immense admiration for Margaret Mead and of how I've been inspired and energized in my own life and work by the example of hers. This fact notwithstanding, Dr. Mead is only one of hundreds of heroes, heroines, role models and shining examples whose lives and works find miraculous convergence in my mind's night sky to guide me like some inner Bethlehem Star to where I seem to need to go.
But of all the constituent parts of that blazing star, my #1 hero (rightly or wrongly, wisely or foolishly) has to be that little boy who shows up at the end of Hans Christian Andersen's wonderful story of "The Emperor's New Clothes," to exclaim out loud what no one else is willing to: that the emperor is naked. As I always like to point out, however: the teller ends his tale there because, as it is aimed at children, it cannot share with its fragile audience the hideous scene which ensues a few seconds later, when the crowd of other onlookers, gathered there in the street to watch the royal procession, turns on the little boy -- my little all-time #1 hero -- like a pack of wild dogs, and stones him to death. Worst of all: it turns out to be his very own family, standing right there beside him in that crowd, who cast the first stones. But, after all: has it ever been otherwise?
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Which brings us to The Stockholm Syndrome, The Lynch Mob Syndrome and The Scapegoat Syndrome. If I were some kind of Margaret Mead from, say, Jupiter, sent here to these United States of America, here in The Roaring Zeros, on a secret mission to "go native" or to "go underground" in order to observe, study and analyze the indigenous population of this place and time -- their (our) cultural patterns and such -- I know for a fact that I'd begin my field notes with a systematic analysis of these three virtually universal patterns of group behavior: The Stockholm Syndrome (It's not just for hostage situations anymore -- and never was!), The Lynch Mob Syndrome (Now an equal opportunity abuser!), and The Scapegoat Syndrome (Power is freedom from responsibility!).
Although the vantage point which Destiny hath dealt me lacks the exotic appeal of a Latter-Day Margaret Mead From Jupiter, I find that I have, in fact, been blessed with enough of an outsider status so as to allow me to observe my fellow Earthlings with what feels to me like just the right degree of detachment so as to perhaps serve as a humble conduit for our learning a little something new and useful about ourselves -- about how we go about being what we are.
Detachment, yes. Distance, no. In fact, it feels to me as though this outsider status which Destiny hath dealt me has, paradoxically, drawn me closer to those around me -- regardless of my literal physical proximity to them, whether measured in centimeters or kilometers. It's as though, being kin to nobody, I've intuitively opted to let myself be kin to everybody.
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Shannon, do you happen to recall what grade we'd have been in when that asphalt "inner" play area (the one for playing four square and hopscotch and for jumping rope -- and for rainy sloppy days in general) was laid down at Fairmount Elementary, between the big red brick main school building and those ticky-tacky green annexes surrounding it and separating it from the expansive outer, dirt & sand, playground? Would it have been around 1957 and, therefore, when we'd have been, say, in Mrs. James' 2nd grade class together? (And, therefore, perhaps 7 or 8 years old?) The reason I'm asking is this:
For the past half century, I've had this recurring image -- actually an entire recurring moment -- a flashback of sorts -- but the blessed blissful opposite of those flashbacks produced by PTSD. It seems to be stirred every time I see workmen spreading fresh hot asphalt with their rakes and shovels and hoes. I suspect that that unmistakable odor of fresh hot asphalt is as much the initial sensory trigger as are any of the visuals.
The flashback to which I'm referring is of a small crew of perhaps 6 or 8 African-American workmen "laying down" that asphalt play area at Fairmount Elementary, one temperate afternoon while our class was outside for recess. I remember that the area where they were doing the pouring and spreading and leveling out of the asphalt which would, the next day, have cooled and hardened into our new play area was cordoned off to prevent curious little heathens such as myself from tramping around in this sticky stinky mess. But what I recall most persistently vividly is my epiphanal experience of gazing out through my insatiably curious hazel eyes at one workman in particular, a somewhat stocky middle-aged fellow, who was putting the finishing touches on the project with the aid of a kind of heavy-duty custodian's push broom. He was dressed in what amounted to rags and tatters -- at least in my wistful reminiscence of the scene -- but he struck me as being strangely free, bent over as he was like an antebellum field hand, performing the very type of grungy manual labor my parents were endlessly warning me that I myself would be stuck with, if I didn't apply myself with sufficient diligence in school.
To put this indelible epiphany into proper perspective, Shannon, let me hasten to emphasize here that I actually enjoyed going to school. Even so, it was at that mystical moment that I first felt kindled within my soul some vague longing to be free in the same sense in which my naive brain mythologized this overworked Black man's being free.
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The more pertinent point I was trying to make, however, in sharing this early childhood epiphany with you, Shannon, was that I now look back on that moment of epiphany as the moment I crossed a metaphorical threshold to make my quiet entrance into The Autodidactikon. That's because it was the moment at which I first began to begin to realize that I was realizing that, as much as I enjoyed school, there was a big wide world just beyond whatever cordon did or did not separate me from it, a world no further from my five hungry senses than was that overworked Black man, smoothing out the fresh hot asphalt that day on the school ground, whom I imagined to be so free. As a psychotherapist, you could have told me that it was my own freedom, and not that workman's, that I was suddenly becoming aware of for the first time, that afternoon at recess.
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I believe that it was Mark Twain who famously said: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." And I suppose that, in some sense, this pithy quote could be adopted as the motto of every autodidact, inscribed in huge lettering over the door to The Autodidactikon -- except that there's more to it than that. Didn't Mark Twain have the equivalent of a 4th grade education? And Abraham Lincoln, no intellectual slouch, was in pretty much the same boat, as were Benjamin Franklin and Socrates.
What I want to know is this: Could folks such as Mark Twain and Lincoln have acquired the "education" they did and born the magnificent fruits they bore, had they poured the precious time and energy of their youth into graduating with good grades from a modern American high school and then going on to struggle through college and graduate school? While the answer to such a question is obviously unknowable, I personally believe that it's worthy of our attention, contemplation and discussion. (Don't you?)
An even more worthwhile question for me is this: How do we go about presenting every child born onto this "great stage of fools" a magical gold ticket to The Autodidactikon?
We both know that we can't.
We also both know that, here in The Roaring Zeros, it requires both knowledge and wisdom – both a tremendous amount of schooling and a lifelong voyage through The Autodidactikon -- for most of us to merely squeak by. Despite our both knowing this, I can see and hear all around me everyday a sizable majority of the local citizenry (including many who are educated enough to know better) proclaiming the fashionable fantasy which constitutes so-called "conventional wisdom."
Not that it's ever been otherwise. It never has been. My favorite books of the bible, the three which I always recommend to young people who want to go straight to the heart of the matter, are the psalms, the proverbs and Ecclesiastes. (By the way: have you had a chance yet to check out my blog that's entitled Ecclesiastes 9:16 (KJV)? I named it after my single favorite passage of scripture -- for those who want to go straight to the heart of the heart of the heart of the matter. Moreover, it goes straight to the heart of today's homily: I mean the one you're reading at this very instant.)
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As nearly as I can recall, it would have been sometime during the summer of 1964 -- between the 9th and 10th grades, between our years at Brooks Junior High and our years at East High, between the JFK assassination and LBJ's landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, when I'd just turned 15 years old -- that I decided to focus my energies on becoming a writer. Well, let me correct that statement right up front: It was sometime during the summer of 1964 that I figured out that I was destined to become some sort of writer. I'm underscoring this correction in my wording here because, looking back, I can see clearly that my moving with increasing intentionality, beginning sometime during the summer of 1964, toward a life of writing was, to be perfectly honest about it, no more a conscious decision on my part than was my being destined to pursue a heterosexual lifestyle or to enter into what others before me had referred to as "a life of the mind" or to incorporate into the deep structure of my personal modalities my father's practical toolmaking skills and my mother's wry sense of humor and touch of the poet.
Be that as it may, because of all the recreational writing in the which I happened to find myself caught up during my 15th summer here on earth and because of the indescribably special way the process of that writing made me feel, I also found myself beginning to make some decisions about how I wanted to go about my life of writing. Or, more accurately: I found myself beginning to be impelled by the midwife of Destiny toward cultivating a talent which said midwife was then in the process of convincing me I might possibly possess, for what I now, in the fullness of time, find myself impelled to name "Mythoklastic Therapy."
A simpler way of putting this might be to say that I began to begin, sometime during the summer 1964, to give myself to an attitude of writing which involved learning lots of new things and then thinking about those things for a while and then passing my mostly processed thoughts along to my readers -- metaphorically somewhat like a cow turning grass into milk. For the sake of brevity, let's agree for the moment to call that end product which I ended up putting into some form or other of writing to share with my readers back then "insight."
This attitude of writing to which I began to begin giving myself, sometime during the summer of 1964, this sharing of what I thought of as my "insight" with my dozen or so readers, worked sufficiently well for me for the 15 or so years that followed. When my first wife, Kate Schulte, and I split up near the end of 1976, however, I found myself going -- as we used to say back then -- "through some major changes." The major change which most closely pertains to today's theme involved my turning away from composing free verse poetry and prose poems and submitting them for publication (with respectable but increasingly unsatisfying success) to literary magazines. It was around this period
Songs had been my first love. (Although, psychoanalytically speaking, my real first love may have been the sound of my own voice, which the songs I learned from other people simply provided me with an excuse to enjoy without undue opprobrium. Throughout our years together at East High School (1964 -- 1967), I had composed somewhere between 30 and 50 songs, a handful of which I can still remember parts of, from time to time. (Mentioning this here reminds me that I've thus far completely omitted from my Autodidactical Travelogue the tedious, clumsy and only moderately successful process of my "teaching myself" to play the guitar and harmonica. We'll try to come back to recounting that particular leg of my Autodidactical Voyage somewhere up ahead. OK?)
I guess that all I'm really trying to say here is that, when I put poetry on the back burner to take up songwriting, sometime during the winter of 1978, it marked a significant turning point in my Voyage Through The Autodidactikon. That's because it marked a kind of paradigm shift in my understanding of for whom I was writing and of from where inside me that writing was coming and what I expected to happen, both within my perceived audience and within me, as a result of this "new" art form to which I was inviting myself to return for the first time in nearly a decade.
And why am I telling you all this, Shannon? What does this late-1970's paradigm shift in my way of thinking about myself as a writer have to do with anything or everything else I've tried to articulate here today?
I suppose that the briefest answer to this question of pertinence would have to be that the breakup with Kate seems to have, in a mostly positive sense, jarred something loose inside my psyche. I'm guessing that, for you as an experienced psychotherapist, the big bouquet of epiphanies I experienced between the autumn of 1976 and the autumn of 1979, must surely resembled the sort of story that you've heard recounted hundreds of times in your office over the years.
As I said at the outset of today's homily: I sometimes feel as though I'm some ancient mariner, swept along by the winds of Destiny, History and Random Chance from island to island, striving mightily to take a few halfway decent field notes as I'm swept along in my Taboo Voyage. What I managed to write down as a "Poet of the 70's" represented one type of field notes. The 200 or so songs which came out of me between 1977 and 1991 represented a second type. The thousands of pages of journal entries and personal correspondence I've produced, over the past 40 years, have represented a third. The field notes which have poured forth in recent years in the form of legal briefs, affidavits, and firsthand accounts of sociopolitical conflict, corporate corruption and abuses committed in the name of organized religion and misbegotten labor relations represent a fourth. And finally, the types of rough drafts of various philosophical treatises, flimsily disguised as installments and/or fragments of this chronicle of my life and times, with the working title of The Toolmaker’s Other Son, one such installment of which you hold in your hands at this very moment, represent a fifth.
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Live a little. Write a little. Live a little. Write a little. Live, write. Live, write. (Rinse & repeat?) But what of the islands themselves? What have they been? And why do I keep insisting on calling my (hopefully lifelong) voyage through The Autodidactikon a taboo voyage? What is there about it which makes it taboo?
Once again, I'm going to grab for the briefest accurate answer I know to offer: The reason why I refer to my voyage through the autodidactikon (through lifelong, postgraduate self-education, in other words) as taboo is because of the simple fact that even the least mention of any of what I've learned along the way, no matter how innocent, well-intentioned and humanitarian, invariably has the effect of upsetting, disturbing, displeasing . . . nearly everybody. I mean to say that, by comparison, the "Inconvenient Truth" referenced in the title of Al Gore's award-winning documentary on global warming cannot hold a candlepower of inconvenience to the supernova of inconvenience invariably provoked by the slightest iota of reportage from the copious field notes I've scribbled down throughout the course of my taboo voyage.
Inconvenient, taboo, unfashionable, unpopular, distasteful, off-putting -- it all comes down to the same thing. What's a Mythoklastic Therapist to do? For lack of any better suggestions, let us now bow our heads and observe a moment of silence in memory of that little boy who shows up at the end of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" to shatter – to klast, as the prototypical Mythoklast -- the myth, i.e. the convenient, fashionable lie that the emperor is richly attired rather than completely naked -- and who is immediately stoned to death for his . . . insight.
Bob Dylan, in an excellent song entitled "Dirge," on his relatively obscure Planet Waves album (1973?), reminds us that "the naked truth is still taboo, whenever it can be seen." Truer words were, of course, never spoken. So, Shannon, another way of saying what I've just now failed to say very well is that my taboo voyage is taboo because its product, the fruit it has born, i.e. my writing, my insight, has turned out to be nothing more or less than the naked truth, which is, by Dylan's highly credible definition, taboo.
I trust you to believe me when I assure you that, at least on a conscious level, when I decided to give myself to a life of writing, back during the summer of 1964, at the age of 15, all those years ago, I never expected my honest, clear-headed reportage to turn out to be anathema. And yet, here we are. Analogous to the little boy who blurted out that the emperor was naked, which was the last thing that anyone wanted to hear, I now find myself approaching the age of 60 having written the 5, 000-page equivalent of "the emperor is naked."
I can't help being reminded of a New Yorker cartoon I saw several years ago. It shows the minister of some respectable, bourgeois looking protestant church, running for his life, out the front door of the church, with an angry mob of his own parishioners hot on his heels, obviously thirsty for his blood. We then see that the title of his sermon that morning was: "Are We All Prostitutes?" The chief difference between his predicament and mine is that, instead of being met with an open, vocal, aggressive hostility which might conceivably have been answered publicly, the hostility to my 5,000-page sermon (my field notes -- in all those manifestations mentioned a few pages back) have been met, for the most part, with a chilly, ostracizing, passive aggressive silence. (Well, so far, so good.)
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But all metaphors break down and fall apart at some point, sooner or later. It's just a matter of where and when. Here's where my metaphor breaks down and falls apart:
Were Galen Green, indeed, some windswept ancient mariner, come back from some buffeted voyage to faraway places inhabited by some exotic race of beings who were practically incapable of telling the truth, who labored beneath the crushing weight of a complete misinterpretation of the cosmos, themselves and one another, and who were, thereby, in the process of destroying themselves, their fellow creatures and their habitat -- then that Galen Green, come home at last, like some Odysseus or Gulliver, would most likely encounter an enthusiastically receptive audience.
But the actual "faraway places" from which Galen Green has returned, with his journals crammed with the field notes described above, the actual exotic countries I've visited -- island by island by island -- in the course of my Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon , have mostly been within the continent of North America, many of them no further away geographically than the outermost reaches of my own epidermis. How this actuality translates, of course, is into the acknowledgement that the aforementioned exotic beings who inhabit these various and sundry "islands" I've visited in my aforementioned windswept voyage are (for the most part) none other than My Fellow Americans.
Thus, I return bearing the incomparable gift of Mythoklastic Therapy. That's the good news. The bad news is that, as is the case with so many other modes of truly effective healing, Mythoklastic Therapy can often prove to be a rather bitter, jagged pill to swallow. Or, to latch onto a somewhat different metaphor: Mythoklastic Therapy can, at times, demand more of the patient than he or she is prepared to give. Or, to flog our theme here with more metaphors than may seem necessary: Mythoklastic Therapy may simply turn out to be a bridge to liberation, empowerment and improved inner wellness . . . his or her half of which the average patient is either unwilling or unable to build.
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Remember the Firesign Theater? A kind of radio acting company -- unique, and yet not entirely unlike the early Monty Python or perhaps a few of the better radio skits you might have heard over the past 25 years on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion (the NPR program, not the Robert Altman swan song). Very popular with certain of us, back in the late 1960's and early 70's. (And they've recently made a startlingly impressive comeback of sorts, by the by.)
Anyway, back in 1974, the Firesign Theater released a comedy record album entitled Everything You Know Is Wrong. I love that title: So utterly straightforward. And for a given segment of the populace, I'm afraid that it's probably an accurate assessment. That is to say that everything they know IS wrong. For the vast majority of us, however, it's probably safer to say that everything you know is wrong serves us best as a cautionary mantra. When, in future installments, I finally get around to revealing -- either systematically or haphazardly -- some of the specifics of what each of the islands upon which I've been shipwrecked has taught me, I'm confidant that it will become clear why I bothered to mention the phrase "Everything You Know Is Wrong" at this early juncture. In point of fact, my reasoning goes straight to the heart of my motive for deciding the attempt to compile The Toolmaker’s Other Son -- in other words, a patchwork of observational discourses and reminiscences of my life and times, of which today's letter has been but a small part.
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And what are the names of the islands we'll be visiting? I haven't decided yet. Trying to choose their names is part of why I'm writing this to you today. What I have decided today is that I still have a considerable amount of processing to do.
If I might possibly possess any helpful insights worth passing along to future generations, they're going to be drawn, by definition and of necessity, from the bittersweet well of what it's been to be me. What it's been like to be me has been to travel, like any number of ancient mariners, from island to island, from foreign place to foreign place, learning along the way. In my own case, however, most of the foreign places have been within the borders of my native land, and what I keep referring to as "islands" are actually those watershed episodes in my life, those epiphanal bends in the river, those peak experiences, which have, for better or worse, proven most worth "writing home" about. Live a little. Write a little. Live a little. Write a little. Live, write. Live, write. (Rinse & repeat!!!)
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
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P.S.
Preview of Coming Attractions:
When we're able to observe an object or a phenomenon from 3 different locations, we call it "triangulation." Therefore, I suppose that observing a thing from 5 different locations might be called "pentangulation;" from 8 different locations, "octangulation" -- and so forth. Ah, but how much more sublime our perspective when we find ourselves with, let's say, a dozen or a thousand locations ("islands") from which to view whatever it might be that we're observing!
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Coda:
LITTLE BROTHER
Little Brother, life is like a boat.
And rowing it all day, your arms get tired.
Your little soul will fly up to its rafter
And look down to where you hang your little coat.
Little Brother, life is poorly wired.
You might burn up before you know what you’re after.
You toss and ride upon life’s purple sea
And dream about a land you once desired.
Little Brother, life will have its laughter,
But please don’t take this as a guarantee
That you’ll have laughed your fill before you end
Or gaze at life forever from your rafter.
Little Brother, you may not agree
That life is both your lover and your friend.
It all depends on what you think you’re after.
But life has loved and walked away from me.
Little Brother, life is what you float upon
And what will break you ‘til you bend.
Little Brother, yesterday I wrote
This note upon a page too torn to ever mend.
Words and music by Galen Green c 1980
Performed on Peasant Cantata c 2003
Excerpted here from The Toolmaker’s Other Son
(working title for) A Memoir by Galen Green
Copyright 2005 – 2007 by Galen Green
All Rights Reserved
/gg
mythoklast@mailstation.com
msmith2210@aol.com
Saturday
November 24, 2007
(my late grandmother,
Phoebe Evans McCall's
127th birthday)
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Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon
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oh if we knew
if we knew what we needed if we even knew
the stars would look to us to guide them
-- W. S. Merwin, from "The Different Stars" (from The Carrier of Ladders; 1970)
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When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
-- from King Lear (Act iv, scene vi) by Wm. Shakespeare
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Dear Shannon (& Co.),
If I might just possibly possess any helpful insights worth passing along to future generations, they're all going to be drawn, by definition and of necessity, from the bittersweet well of what it's been to be me. In this sense, what teacher, writer or grandparent can, after all, ever hope to wholly escape the taint of subjectivity? What it's been like to be me has been to travel, like any number of ancient mariners (Odysseus being my personal favorite among them), from island to island, from foreign place to foreign place, learning what I could along the way. This past summer and fall, I finally got around to reading The Education of Henry Adams , a book so nice I read it twice. And while neither of my grandfathers happened to have been President of the United States, nor any of my great-grandfathers to have been a signer of The Declaration of Independence; and while my own Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon has not been as well-financed nor as impressively peopled as was that of Henry Adams (1838 -- 1918), I couldn't help being struck by a handful of significant parallels between the process of his education and that of my own education. Foremost among these parallels would have to be the stark contrast between our so-called "formal" and "informal" education. In Henry Adams' case, the irony which inheres in this contrast pulses through every chapter of his chronicle to become, in the final analysis, one of the dominant themes in The Education of Henry Adams, and perhaps most inescapably in the title itself,
as though Adams were smiling at the reader from the corner of each page, saying to us: "Oh! Did you think that this was going to be about my schooling? Well, surprise!"
Thus, as you'd probably imagine, The Education of Henry Adams (published posthumously), like the education of Galen Green, turns out to have been a journey fraught with serendipity. Likewise, both his education and mine involve a considerable amount of self-education, i.e. autodidacticism.
Somewhere in his hefty classic, Adams even comes right out and says that (to paraphrase here) most of the burden of learning is in learning how to learn. For most human beings, living in most times and places and under most circumstances, learning how to learn translates as learning how to teach oneself.
So, if autodidacticism is such a nearly universal human experience, then why do we hear so little about it, here in the America of The Roaring Zeros? That's a very good question.
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”Live a little. Write a little. Live a little. Write a little. Live, write. Live, write. (Rinse & repeat?)" That sounds a lot less pretentious than my comparing my autodidactical travelogue to the majestically mythical voyages, shipwrecks and heroic deeds of someone like Odysseus -- or, for that matter, to the Boston Brahmin, first-class, five-star, Henry Jamesish, aristocratic, genteel "education" of someone like Henry Adams.
I purchased a used book a year or so ago for a quarter (25 cents, American) entitled Blackberry Winter (My Early Years) by Margaret Mead (Wm. Morrow, 1972; 351 pages; hardcover). The Red Bridge Branch of the Mid-continent Public Library here in Kansas City was discarding it, most likely for lack of interest. I'd thumbed through it briefly then shelved it for future reference. It's been gathering dust in our office library at home ever since. Until last night. After I'd had a chance to read over what I'd written here yesterday, it "dawned on me" (as my late mother, Margaret, used to say) that the time had come for me to take down my dog-eared copy of Mead's memoir and revisit some of the immense admiration I'd felt for her back in the early 1970's, when she was at the sunset of her life and career and I as just beginning to mosey into the noonday of mine.
Not that I'm any kind of expert on Margaret Mead (1901 -- 1978); I'm not. I can guarantee you that the most mediocre second-year Cultural Anthropology major at the most third-rate of America's state universities probably knows ten times as much about Mead and her work as I ever will. That's mostly because Cultural Anthropology, strictly speaking, is not my "field." Nevertheless, I've found myself inspired and energized by Mead, her writing, her vigorous mind and vibrant imagination, and even her admittedly Gerry-rigged methodology, throughout the entirety of my own checkered career. And if I had adequate time to paint for you a detailed canvas of my own life and work in the 40 years since you and I graduated from high school there in Wichita, Kansas in 1967, I suspect that you'd understand in fairly short order the metaphorical parallels between Mead's "process" and mine.
Even so, I myself can easily understand how any comparison between my career and that of the illustrious Dr. Margaret Mead might strike most folks as laughable -- and even delusional . . . until they allowed themselves to get close enough to actually look inside the thing -- that thing being my own unique and fruitful Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon. Throughout her career, Dr. Mead traveled to many exotic places, encountered and studied a number of previously underdocumented (or misdocumented) cultural patterns and survived to tell about it -- as have I. Where both she and I have run into the troublesome teeth and claws of monstrous theocratic disapproval has been to do with the taboo factor. To put it much more simply that "it" deserves to be put: Most of the cultural patterns which both Margaret Mead and I survived to tell about turned out not to be what the powers that be (and the stooges of the powers that be) WANTED for us to have learned. Both her field notes and mine contained a bit too much inconvenient truth.
This is, of course, one of the main reasons why The Autodidactikon which is the natural habitat of any investigative journalist, cultural anthropologist or mythoklastic therapist worth his or her salt, has lost favor with "the academy;" inconvenient truth, taboo truth, scientifically verifiable truth, etc . . . are the inevitable products of any clear-minded honest inquiry. But exactly what, you may be asking, do I mean by The Autodidactikon?
Because it is a construct, a useful fiction, a metaphor, existing in the imagination (albeit, the most rational realms of the imagination), let's settle, for now, on the following functional definition: The Autodidactikon is that otherwise indefinable passageway through which every human creature voyages in his or her (hopefully lifelong) process of inviting the world, nature, the cosmos, etc. to teach him or her whatever is worth knowing. Another way of putting it might be to say that The Autodidactikon is that inextricably interwoven braid of modes, means, and media whereby we teach ourselves "stuff," i.e. wherewith we do autodidacticism.
I personally imagine The Autodidactikon to be both (and inexplicably simultaneously) a marvelous machine, like the fabled orgasmatron and a bright azure sea over which I voyage from shipwreck to shipwreck -- the total phantasmagorical experience of which I nickname "wisdom."
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I spoke earlier of my immense admiration for Margaret Mead and of how I've been inspired and energized in my own life and work by the example of hers. This fact notwithstanding, Dr. Mead is only one of hundreds of heroes, heroines, role models and shining examples whose lives and works find miraculous convergence in my mind's night sky to guide me like some inner Bethlehem Star to where I seem to need to go.
But of all the constituent parts of that blazing star, my #1 hero (rightly or wrongly, wisely or foolishly) has to be that little boy who shows up at the end of Hans Christian Andersen's wonderful story of "The Emperor's New Clothes," to exclaim out loud what no one else is willing to: that the emperor is naked. As I always like to point out, however: the teller ends his tale there because, as it is aimed at children, it cannot share with its fragile audience the hideous scene which ensues a few seconds later, when the crowd of other onlookers, gathered there in the street to watch the royal procession, turns on the little boy -- my little all-time #1 hero -- like a pack of wild dogs, and stones him to death. Worst of all: it turns out to be his very own family, standing right there beside him in that crowd, who cast the first stones. But, after all: has it ever been otherwise?
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Which brings us to The Stockholm Syndrome, The Lynch Mob Syndrome and The Scapegoat Syndrome. If I were some kind of Margaret Mead from, say, Jupiter, sent here to these United States of America, here in The Roaring Zeros, on a secret mission to "go native" or to "go underground" in order to observe, study and analyze the indigenous population of this place and time -- their (our) cultural patterns and such -- I know for a fact that I'd begin my field notes with a systematic analysis of these three virtually universal patterns of group behavior: The Stockholm Syndrome (It's not just for hostage situations anymore -- and never was!), The Lynch Mob Syndrome (Now an equal opportunity abuser!), and The Scapegoat Syndrome (Power is freedom from responsibility!).
Although the vantage point which Destiny hath dealt me lacks the exotic appeal of a Latter-Day Margaret Mead From Jupiter, I find that I have, in fact, been blessed with enough of an outsider status so as to allow me to observe my fellow Earthlings with what feels to me like just the right degree of detachment so as to perhaps serve as a humble conduit for our learning a little something new and useful about ourselves -- about how we go about being what we are.
Detachment, yes. Distance, no. In fact, it feels to me as though this outsider status which Destiny hath dealt me has, paradoxically, drawn me closer to those around me -- regardless of my literal physical proximity to them, whether measured in centimeters or kilometers. It's as though, being kin to nobody, I've intuitively opted to let myself be kin to everybody.
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Shannon, do you happen to recall what grade we'd have been in when that asphalt "inner" play area (the one for playing four square and hopscotch and for jumping rope -- and for rainy sloppy days in general) was laid down at Fairmount Elementary, between the big red brick main school building and those ticky-tacky green annexes surrounding it and separating it from the expansive outer, dirt & sand, playground? Would it have been around 1957 and, therefore, when we'd have been, say, in Mrs. James' 2nd grade class together? (And, therefore, perhaps 7 or 8 years old?) The reason I'm asking is this:
For the past half century, I've had this recurring image -- actually an entire recurring moment -- a flashback of sorts -- but the blessed blissful opposite of those flashbacks produced by PTSD. It seems to be stirred every time I see workmen spreading fresh hot asphalt with their rakes and shovels and hoes. I suspect that that unmistakable odor of fresh hot asphalt is as much the initial sensory trigger as are any of the visuals.
The flashback to which I'm referring is of a small crew of perhaps 6 or 8 African-American workmen "laying down" that asphalt play area at Fairmount Elementary, one temperate afternoon while our class was outside for recess. I remember that the area where they were doing the pouring and spreading and leveling out of the asphalt which would, the next day, have cooled and hardened into our new play area was cordoned off to prevent curious little heathens such as myself from tramping around in this sticky stinky mess. But what I recall most persistently vividly is my epiphanal experience of gazing out through my insatiably curious hazel eyes at one workman in particular, a somewhat stocky middle-aged fellow, who was putting the finishing touches on the project with the aid of a kind of heavy-duty custodian's push broom. He was dressed in what amounted to rags and tatters -- at least in my wistful reminiscence of the scene -- but he struck me as being strangely free, bent over as he was like an antebellum field hand, performing the very type of grungy manual labor my parents were endlessly warning me that I myself would be stuck with, if I didn't apply myself with sufficient diligence in school.
To put this indelible epiphany into proper perspective, Shannon, let me hasten to emphasize here that I actually enjoyed going to school. Even so, it was at that mystical moment that I first felt kindled within my soul some vague longing to be free in the same sense in which my naive brain mythologized this overworked Black man's being free.
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The more pertinent point I was trying to make, however, in sharing this early childhood epiphany with you, Shannon, was that I now look back on that moment of epiphany as the moment I crossed a metaphorical threshold to make my quiet entrance into The Autodidactikon. That's because it was the moment at which I first began to begin to realize that I was realizing that, as much as I enjoyed school, there was a big wide world just beyond whatever cordon did or did not separate me from it, a world no further from my five hungry senses than was that overworked Black man, smoothing out the fresh hot asphalt that day on the school ground, whom I imagined to be so free. As a psychotherapist, you could have told me that it was my own freedom, and not that workman's, that I was suddenly becoming aware of for the first time, that afternoon at recess.
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I believe that it was Mark Twain who famously said: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." And I suppose that, in some sense, this pithy quote could be adopted as the motto of every autodidact, inscribed in huge lettering over the door to The Autodidactikon -- except that there's more to it than that. Didn't Mark Twain have the equivalent of a 4th grade education? And Abraham Lincoln, no intellectual slouch, was in pretty much the same boat, as were Benjamin Franklin and Socrates.
What I want to know is this: Could folks such as Mark Twain and Lincoln have acquired the "education" they did and born the magnificent fruits they bore, had they poured the precious time and energy of their youth into graduating with good grades from a modern American high school and then going on to struggle through college and graduate school? While the answer to such a question is obviously unknowable, I personally believe that it's worthy of our attention, contemplation and discussion. (Don't you?)
An even more worthwhile question for me is this: How do we go about presenting every child born onto this "great stage of fools" a magical gold ticket to The Autodidactikon?
We both know that we can't.
We also both know that, here in The Roaring Zeros, it requires both knowledge and wisdom – both a tremendous amount of schooling and a lifelong voyage through The Autodidactikon -- for most of us to merely squeak by. Despite our both knowing this, I can see and hear all around me everyday a sizable majority of the local citizenry (including many who are educated enough to know better) proclaiming the fashionable fantasy which constitutes so-called "conventional wisdom."
Not that it's ever been otherwise. It never has been. My favorite books of the bible, the three which I always recommend to young people who want to go straight to the heart of the matter, are the psalms, the proverbs and Ecclesiastes. (By the way: have you had a chance yet to check out my blog that's entitled Ecclesiastes 9:16 (KJV)? I named it after my single favorite passage of scripture -- for those who want to go straight to the heart of the heart of the heart of the matter. Moreover, it goes straight to the heart of today's homily: I mean the one you're reading at this very instant.)
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As nearly as I can recall, it would have been sometime during the summer of 1964 -- between the 9th and 10th grades, between our years at Brooks Junior High and our years at East High, between the JFK assassination and LBJ's landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, when I'd just turned 15 years old -- that I decided to focus my energies on becoming a writer. Well, let me correct that statement right up front: It was sometime during the summer of 1964 that I figured out that I was destined to become some sort of writer. I'm underscoring this correction in my wording here because, looking back, I can see clearly that my moving with increasing intentionality, beginning sometime during the summer of 1964, toward a life of writing was, to be perfectly honest about it, no more a conscious decision on my part than was my being destined to pursue a heterosexual lifestyle or to enter into what others before me had referred to as "a life of the mind" or to incorporate into the deep structure of my personal modalities my father's practical toolmaking skills and my mother's wry sense of humor and touch of the poet.
Be that as it may, because of all the recreational writing in the which I happened to find myself caught up during my 15th summer here on earth and because of the indescribably special way the process of that writing made me feel, I also found myself beginning to make some decisions about how I wanted to go about my life of writing. Or, more accurately: I found myself beginning to be impelled by the midwife of Destiny toward cultivating a talent which said midwife was then in the process of convincing me I might possibly possess, for what I now, in the fullness of time, find myself impelled to name "Mythoklastic Therapy."
A simpler way of putting this might be to say that I began to begin, sometime during the summer 1964, to give myself to an attitude of writing which involved learning lots of new things and then thinking about those things for a while and then passing my mostly processed thoughts along to my readers -- metaphorically somewhat like a cow turning grass into milk. For the sake of brevity, let's agree for the moment to call that end product which I ended up putting into some form or other of writing to share with my readers back then "insight."
This attitude of writing to which I began to begin giving myself, sometime during the summer of 1964, this sharing of what I thought of as my "insight" with my dozen or so readers, worked sufficiently well for me for the 15 or so years that followed. When my first wife, Kate Schulte, and I split up near the end of 1976, however, I found myself going -- as we used to say back then -- "through some major changes." The major change which most closely pertains to today's theme involved my turning away from composing free verse poetry and prose poems and submitting them for publication (with respectable but increasingly unsatisfying success) to literary magazines. It was around this period
Songs had been my first love. (Although, psychoanalytically speaking, my real first love may have been the sound of my own voice, which the songs I learned from other people simply provided me with an excuse to enjoy without undue opprobrium. Throughout our years together at East High School (1964 -- 1967), I had composed somewhere between 30 and 50 songs, a handful of which I can still remember parts of, from time to time. (Mentioning this here reminds me that I've thus far completely omitted from my Autodidactical Travelogue the tedious, clumsy and only moderately successful process of my "teaching myself" to play the guitar and harmonica. We'll try to come back to recounting that particular leg of my Autodidactical Voyage somewhere up ahead. OK?)
I guess that all I'm really trying to say here is that, when I put poetry on the back burner to take up songwriting, sometime during the winter of 1978, it marked a significant turning point in my Voyage Through The Autodidactikon. That's because it marked a kind of paradigm shift in my understanding of for whom I was writing and of from where inside me that writing was coming and what I expected to happen, both within my perceived audience and within me, as a result of this "new" art form to which I was inviting myself to return for the first time in nearly a decade.
And why am I telling you all this, Shannon? What does this late-1970's paradigm shift in my way of thinking about myself as a writer have to do with anything or everything else I've tried to articulate here today?
I suppose that the briefest answer to this question of pertinence would have to be that the breakup with Kate seems to have, in a mostly positive sense, jarred something loose inside my psyche. I'm guessing that, for you as an experienced psychotherapist, the big bouquet of epiphanies I experienced between the autumn of 1976 and the autumn of 1979, must surely resembled the sort of story that you've heard recounted hundreds of times in your office over the years.
As I said at the outset of today's homily: I sometimes feel as though I'm some ancient mariner, swept along by the winds of Destiny, History and Random Chance from island to island, striving mightily to take a few halfway decent field notes as I'm swept along in my Taboo Voyage. What I managed to write down as a "Poet of the 70's" represented one type of field notes. The 200 or so songs which came out of me between 1977 and 1991 represented a second type. The thousands of pages of journal entries and personal correspondence I've produced, over the past 40 years, have represented a third. The field notes which have poured forth in recent years in the form of legal briefs, affidavits, and firsthand accounts of sociopolitical conflict, corporate corruption and abuses committed in the name of organized religion and misbegotten labor relations represent a fourth. And finally, the types of rough drafts of various philosophical treatises, flimsily disguised as installments and/or fragments of this chronicle of my life and times, with the working title of The Toolmaker’s Other Son, one such installment of which you hold in your hands at this very moment, represent a fifth.
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Live a little. Write a little. Live a little. Write a little. Live, write. Live, write. (Rinse & repeat?) But what of the islands themselves? What have they been? And why do I keep insisting on calling my (hopefully lifelong) voyage through The Autodidactikon a taboo voyage? What is there about it which makes it taboo?
Once again, I'm going to grab for the briefest accurate answer I know to offer: The reason why I refer to my voyage through the autodidactikon (through lifelong, postgraduate self-education, in other words) as taboo is because of the simple fact that even the least mention of any of what I've learned along the way, no matter how innocent, well-intentioned and humanitarian, invariably has the effect of upsetting, disturbing, displeasing . . . nearly everybody. I mean to say that, by comparison, the "Inconvenient Truth" referenced in the title of Al Gore's award-winning documentary on global warming cannot hold a candlepower of inconvenience to the supernova of inconvenience invariably provoked by the slightest iota of reportage from the copious field notes I've scribbled down throughout the course of my taboo voyage.
Inconvenient, taboo, unfashionable, unpopular, distasteful, off-putting -- it all comes down to the same thing. What's a Mythoklastic Therapist to do? For lack of any better suggestions, let us now bow our heads and observe a moment of silence in memory of that little boy who shows up at the end of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" to shatter – to klast, as the prototypical Mythoklast -- the myth, i.e. the convenient, fashionable lie that the emperor is richly attired rather than completely naked -- and who is immediately stoned to death for his . . . insight.
Bob Dylan, in an excellent song entitled "Dirge," on his relatively obscure Planet Waves album (1973?), reminds us that "the naked truth is still taboo, whenever it can be seen." Truer words were, of course, never spoken. So, Shannon, another way of saying what I've just now failed to say very well is that my taboo voyage is taboo because its product, the fruit it has born, i.e. my writing, my insight, has turned out to be nothing more or less than the naked truth, which is, by Dylan's highly credible definition, taboo.
I trust you to believe me when I assure you that, at least on a conscious level, when I decided to give myself to a life of writing, back during the summer of 1964, at the age of 15, all those years ago, I never expected my honest, clear-headed reportage to turn out to be anathema. And yet, here we are. Analogous to the little boy who blurted out that the emperor was naked, which was the last thing that anyone wanted to hear, I now find myself approaching the age of 60 having written the 5, 000-page equivalent of "the emperor is naked."
I can't help being reminded of a New Yorker cartoon I saw several years ago. It shows the minister of some respectable, bourgeois looking protestant church, running for his life, out the front door of the church, with an angry mob of his own parishioners hot on his heels, obviously thirsty for his blood. We then see that the title of his sermon that morning was: "Are We All Prostitutes?" The chief difference between his predicament and mine is that, instead of being met with an open, vocal, aggressive hostility which might conceivably have been answered publicly, the hostility to my 5,000-page sermon (my field notes -- in all those manifestations mentioned a few pages back) have been met, for the most part, with a chilly, ostracizing, passive aggressive silence. (Well, so far, so good.)
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But all metaphors break down and fall apart at some point, sooner or later. It's just a matter of where and when. Here's where my metaphor breaks down and falls apart:
Were Galen Green, indeed, some windswept ancient mariner, come back from some buffeted voyage to faraway places inhabited by some exotic race of beings who were practically incapable of telling the truth, who labored beneath the crushing weight of a complete misinterpretation of the cosmos, themselves and one another, and who were, thereby, in the process of destroying themselves, their fellow creatures and their habitat -- then that Galen Green, come home at last, like some Odysseus or Gulliver, would most likely encounter an enthusiastically receptive audience.
But the actual "faraway places" from which Galen Green has returned, with his journals crammed with the field notes described above, the actual exotic countries I've visited -- island by island by island -- in the course of my Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon , have mostly been within the continent of North America, many of them no further away geographically than the outermost reaches of my own epidermis. How this actuality translates, of course, is into the acknowledgement that the aforementioned exotic beings who inhabit these various and sundry "islands" I've visited in my aforementioned windswept voyage are (for the most part) none other than My Fellow Americans.
Thus, I return bearing the incomparable gift of Mythoklastic Therapy. That's the good news. The bad news is that, as is the case with so many other modes of truly effective healing, Mythoklastic Therapy can often prove to be a rather bitter, jagged pill to swallow. Or, to latch onto a somewhat different metaphor: Mythoklastic Therapy can, at times, demand more of the patient than he or she is prepared to give. Or, to flog our theme here with more metaphors than may seem necessary: Mythoklastic Therapy may simply turn out to be a bridge to liberation, empowerment and improved inner wellness . . . his or her half of which the average patient is either unwilling or unable to build.
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Remember the Firesign Theater? A kind of radio acting company -- unique, and yet not entirely unlike the early Monty Python or perhaps a few of the better radio skits you might have heard over the past 25 years on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion (the NPR program, not the Robert Altman swan song). Very popular with certain of us, back in the late 1960's and early 70's. (And they've recently made a startlingly impressive comeback of sorts, by the by.)
Anyway, back in 1974, the Firesign Theater released a comedy record album entitled Everything You Know Is Wrong. I love that title: So utterly straightforward. And for a given segment of the populace, I'm afraid that it's probably an accurate assessment. That is to say that everything they know IS wrong. For the vast majority of us, however, it's probably safer to say that everything you know is wrong serves us best as a cautionary mantra. When, in future installments, I finally get around to revealing -- either systematically or haphazardly -- some of the specifics of what each of the islands upon which I've been shipwrecked has taught me, I'm confidant that it will become clear why I bothered to mention the phrase "Everything You Know Is Wrong" at this early juncture. In point of fact, my reasoning goes straight to the heart of my motive for deciding the attempt to compile The Toolmaker’s Other Son -- in other words, a patchwork of observational discourses and reminiscences of my life and times, of which today's letter has been but a small part.
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And what are the names of the islands we'll be visiting? I haven't decided yet. Trying to choose their names is part of why I'm writing this to you today. What I have decided today is that I still have a considerable amount of processing to do.
If I might possibly possess any helpful insights worth passing along to future generations, they're going to be drawn, by definition and of necessity, from the bittersweet well of what it's been to be me. What it's been like to be me has been to travel, like any number of ancient mariners, from island to island, from foreign place to foreign place, learning along the way. In my own case, however, most of the foreign places have been within the borders of my native land, and what I keep referring to as "islands" are actually those watershed episodes in my life, those epiphanal bends in the river, those peak experiences, which have, for better or worse, proven most worth "writing home" about. Live a little. Write a little. Live a little. Write a little. Live, write. Live, write. (Rinse & repeat!!!)
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
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P.S.
Preview of Coming Attractions:
When we're able to observe an object or a phenomenon from 3 different locations, we call it "triangulation." Therefore, I suppose that observing a thing from 5 different locations might be called "pentangulation;" from 8 different locations, "octangulation" -- and so forth. Ah, but how much more sublime our perspective when we find ourselves with, let's say, a dozen or a thousand locations ("islands") from which to view whatever it might be that we're observing!
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Coda:
LITTLE BROTHER
Little Brother, life is like a boat.
And rowing it all day, your arms get tired.
Your little soul will fly up to its rafter
And look down to where you hang your little coat.
Little Brother, life is poorly wired.
You might burn up before you know what you’re after.
You toss and ride upon life’s purple sea
And dream about a land you once desired.
Little Brother, life will have its laughter,
But please don’t take this as a guarantee
That you’ll have laughed your fill before you end
Or gaze at life forever from your rafter.
Little Brother, you may not agree
That life is both your lover and your friend.
It all depends on what you think you’re after.
But life has loved and walked away from me.
Little Brother, life is what you float upon
And what will break you ‘til you bend.
Little Brother, yesterday I wrote
This note upon a page too torn to ever mend.
Words and music by Galen Green c 1980
Performed on Peasant Cantata c 2003
Excerpted here from The Toolmaker’s Other Son
(working title for) A Memoir by Galen Green
Copyright 2005 – 2007 by Galen Green
All Rights Reserved
/gg
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Galen Green
mythoklast@mailstation.com
msmith2210@aol.com
Kansas City, Missouri
Wednesday
December 05, 2007
(my late grandfather, Will
McCall's 140th birthday)
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From Within the Heart of the Heart of the Song
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Let your mercy spill on all these burning hearts in hell,
if it be your will to make us well.
And draw us near and bind us tight,
all your children here in their rags of light . . .
-- Leonard Cohen, from "If It Be Your Will"
on Various Positions (album released 1984)
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It's not ignorance does so much damage; it's knowin' so derned much that ain't so.
-- Josh Billings, American Humorist
(born Henry Wheeler Shaw, 1818 -- 1885)
%%%%%%%
I heard it in the wind last night
It sounded like applause
Chilly now
End of summer
No more shiny hot nights
It was just the arbutus rustling
And the bumping of the logs
And the moon swept down black water
Like an empty spotlight
-- Joni Mitchell, from “For the Roses” (1972)
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Dear Shannon (& Co.),
Welcome to the seventh installment of my memoir within a memoir. As always, I hope that all's well with you and yours. Thanks for your thoughtful suggestions and kind comments. I appreciate that very much. Please know that I understand perfectly well how busy you are and that you're not likely to have the opportunity to write to me all that much in the near future. Truth to tell: I wouldn't have been able to pour forth to the extent that I have in recent weeks, were it not for an uncharacteristic convergence of favorable circumstances at work. Because I realize that this bit of good fortune is inevitably in limited supply, I’ve been making every attempt to “make hay while the sun shines.” Please be assured that this rate of flow isn’t likely to remain steady for all that much longer. If by some miracle, however, it does, then please accept my eternal gratitude for your having provided me with just the right “audience” to impel me into accomplishing a long overdue step toward make The Toolmaker’s Other Son make clearer sense to a more general audience. Thanks!
Having been in “talk therapy” from time to time, particularly back in the 1980’s, for a few months here and a few months there, I’ve had a meager amount of practice in telling my life story in a relatively few words. But I don’t feel as though I’ve ever been very good at it. This probably has to do with my having been raised by an adoptive mother and father both of whose families of origin were quiet country people. (Both the Greens and the McCalls would have fit quite comfortably into Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegone, Minnesota. Remnants of the breed, in fact, still haunt a few of the houses and Methodist churches of Franklin and Osage Counties in northeaster Kansas.)
I mention this narrative shortcoming on my part only by way of prefacing my contemplating making a sort of “dry run” at telling my life story – or at least at talking about telling my life story.
Every life is a story. And every life story is worth telling, but not necessarily all for the same set of reasons. I seriously doubt that, for me, the telling of my story (or of significant portions thereof) would have ever in this lifetime drifted to near the top of my “to do list,” i.e. my long-term priorities list, had I not turned out to be, for an inordinate number of scoundrels and charlatans (vipers and scorpions) such an attractive target of slander, libel and all manner of calumny and fraud.
Moreover, I firmly believe that, in the process of "setting the record straight" (as the cliché goes), I may be able to serve as a paradigm case study to at least a few of the millions of hapless folks in similar situations. In other words, I've set out to compile The Toolmaker's Other Son, at least in part, as a tool for building solidarity among those folks whom I believe need a revitalized solidarity the most.
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On several occasions in the recent past, I've sat down with myself and taken a stab at organizing the chronology of my 58 years here on earth so as to make it make sense to a relatively disinterested reader. Thus far, however, I've been pretty dissatisfied with the results of every such effort.
A couple of autobiographers who seem to have worked out within themselves some mode of stylistic compromise which both informs and entertains with relatively harmonious balance are Bob Dylan and Henry Adams. Dylan is sometimes anecdotal and sometimes a straightforward chronicler, in the first (and so far only) volume of his Chronicles. Adams, on the other hand, tends to tend toward the philosophical, toying coyly with his reader's perfectly natural curiosity about the aristocratic lifestyle of a man most famous for having been descended from famous Adams ancestors. While the organizing principles employed by both Adams and Dylan are admirable and even inspiring, they'll likely prove to be of limited utility to me. That's because I'm a relative nobody, compared to Adams and Dylan.
Nowadays, of course, both the most entertaining and the most illuminating autobiographies usually take the form of fiction. Two examples of what I have in mind in saying this are the novels of Philip Roth and Antonya Nelson. * Roth's works you're likely already somewhat familiar with, if only by reputation. Tony Nelson's novels and short stories you may be less familiar with, although you knew her family -- at least tangentially -- and perhaps even brushed up against her when she'd have been a very young girl growing up in Wichita. You may have even babysat her. I know that I did.
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* Antonya Nelson (b. 1961) is an American author from Wichita, Kansas. She received an MFA from the University of Arizona and has published four collections of short stories, some of which have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper's. She received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2000.
Nelson is the author of five short story collections, including Some Fun (Scribner’s 2006), In The Land Of Men, and three novels (Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. Her books have been New York Times Notable Books of 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002, and she was named in 1999 by The New Yorker as one of the “twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium.”
She is the recipient of the 2003 Rea Award for the Short Story, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas.
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Do you remember James Nelson from Brooks Junior High? (If not, check the yearbook, if you still have it. I don't.) James is our age. And although he was markedly different from me in temperament and taste, he and I became close friends by the 9th grade. As with the late Danny Butcher (et al.), he'd attended Carter Elementary.
Eventually, I hope to write an entire chapter (perhaps 10 or 20 pages) on my long and extensive connection to the Nelson family. I suppose that it'd be safe to say that it all began with my bonding as buds with James, who subsequently invited me over to their house on several occasions, probably in 1963 or '64 to listen to his impressive collection of (mostly) automotive related LP's. For our younger readers: Those were 12" vinyl phonograph recordings. Each one held approximately 45 minutes of music or other prerecorded sound. They represented cutting edge audio technology during the period from perhaps 1960 thru 1980. Without them, there'd have been no Beatles. And again, for our younger readers: just think of The Beatles as Sir Paul McCartney's first back-up band. And, for our much younger readers: Sir Paul McCartney will probably be best remembered as the golden throated composer and singer of such popular classics as "Yesterday" and "Hey Jude" -- as well as for having been, for 30 years, the husband of the late Linda Eastman McCartney, whose fine line of vegetarian frozen foods can be found (as of this writing) in America's better supermarkets.
Anyway, Antonya Nelson is James Nelson's sister -- or, more precisely, half-sister. As you can see from the footnote (below) which I stole from Wikipedia, Tony is 12 years younger than us. At the time she was born, their family was living on Gentry, across from Fairmount Park, maybe 3 or 4 houses from the corner of Gentry & 16th Street. Did you know any of them back then -- you or your brother or parents? Although I first met the late Dr. Bill (F.W.) Nelson and his lovely second wife, Susan -- Tony's (& David's & Julie's) mother -- way back in the mid-1960's, I didn't really get to know any of them, except for James, until 1968. By then, they'd all moved to the large white stucco house on the southwest corner of 1st Street & Roosevelt in College Hill. I actually lived with them from March until June of 1970 (a long story in itself) and "babysat" Tony, the budding novelist, and her younger siblings, on rare occasions.
I hope you'll forgive my digression from the theme of today's ramble, which is supposed to constitute my contemplation of how I'll end up structuring The Toolmaker's Other Son. As I was starting to say: Nowadays, both the most entertaining and the most illuminating autobiographies usually take the form of fiction, of which Tony Nelson's excellent novels and short stories present us with useful examples; although, in the case of Tony's writing, as with a significant proportion of fictional writing overall, such stylistic concepts as "thinly veiled" and "loosely based upon" frequently apply.
I say this only because of my own observations drawn from my aforementioned extensive connection with her family of origin throughout the 1960's & 70's. I'm tempted to provide you with a few illustrative details; but, to do so in this context, would necessitate my violating one of the guidelines I've laid down for myself as a memoirist, and that is not to make life any more difficult that it already is for any of the people in my past who may still be above ground. While this degree of self-imposed punch-pulling goes against my overall nature and represents a compromise of several others of my guidelines as a memoirist, it simply makes a lot of practical sense when contextualized in "the great overview." However, suffice it say that, when Garrison Keillor reminds us that that child in any given family who grows up to write about his or her childhood and family never tends to be the most compassionate nor the most fair-minded child in the family, he could easily have had Tony Nelson in mind. Let's leave it at that.
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In much the same way that the renowned fiction writer Antonya Nelson weaves reminiscences and reflections from her past observations and experiences into the stuff of story, so her former babysitter and family friend Galen Green weaves his reminiscences and reflections from his past observations and experiences into the stuff of non-story. What I mean, in this particular context, by the term "non-story" might most accurately be equated with "critical analysis," a term not remotely as "sexy" as words like "story" or "fiction." Thus lacking in sex appeal (in the marketing sense of that term), critical analysis must needs find compensatory avenues into the hearts and minds of any potential readership it hopes to entice.
In other words: Why would an otherwise totally disinterested occasional reader of The New Yorker (or of The Kansas Quarterly, for that matter) or of Philip Roth's novels -- or occasional listener to the music of Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan or J.S. Bach -- or occasional patron of art house films (or Woody Allen films -- or whatever) . . . why, oh why, would such a prospective reader of The Toolmaker's Other Son . . . bother to give this memoir of mine the time of day?
While I'll readily admit here that I may be deluding myself in this, I can actually think of several reasons, off hand, several motivating factors. The first of these, paradoxically, is the flip side of what it is that's likely to drive the average reader of memoirs away -- or at least to keep the disinterested disinterested. We might most bluntly call this factor "the nobody factor." To wit: "What the heck makes this complete nobody think that a busy, educated, discriminating reader such as myself would have the least bit of interest in reading a book about his life and times?" This type of perfectly natural reaction, however, conceals precisely the preconsciously prelogical attraction which has been known to sell more than a few books by other ostensible nobodies. Let us abbreviate this attraction semi-accurately as "curiosity" and then move on.
A second potential motivating factor which might "put some butts in those seats" (as we say in show biz) we'll call "the solidarity factor." Surely I was not the only 20-year-old hitchhiker traveling from New York City to New England (and, in my case, points north), in August of 1969, to make the conscious, unfashionable and eminently sane decision to skip Woodstock (the legendary music festival) -- just as I (and thousands like me) had gone out of our way to forego attending the insane war in Indochina. My point here being that I'm not the only tree-hugging folksonging secular humanist tax-and-spend liberal Democrat with a mind (and a conscience and an imagination and a philosophy and a theology) of my own. And I'm banking on at least a handful of my soul mates out there in Toyland feeling just enough of a tug of solidarity with the subject/author of The Toolmaker's Other Son to cough up the price of theater ticket to wallow a while in said solidarity.
Even though there are several other motivating factors which could have the potential for selling more than a handful of copies of my memoir-in-progress (and which, in turn, help to motivate me to keep on cranking it out, inch by toilsome inch) I'm going to bother you here with only one more, a third. I guess I'll call it "the genre factor," mostly due to the fact that my memoir doesn't conform neatly to the accepted definitions of any of the genre one usually walks into a bookstore to look for. It refuses to fit neatly into any pigeonhole. It's certainly not a novel or a collection of poems or stories. Nor is it, strictly speaking, a conventional autobiography nor a philosophical treatise, a political manifesto, a theological discourse, a cookbook, a how-to manual, an edifying guide for troubled youth, an anthology of music, art or movie reviews, nor the confessions of a fallen screen idol or disgraced sports hero.
And although it is constructed around the scaffolding of Galen Green's rather ordinary, rather extraordinary life story, The Toolmaker's Other Son doesn't presume to be the story of Galen Green's life. It's not the story of anything. It is, as has already been established, a non-story.
A preliminary introduction to The Toolmaker's Other Son, which I drafted in the autumn of 2005 (roughly two years ago, in other words), is largely constructed around the image of a colorful 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, its pieces dumped out onto the living room carpet to be put together as a cozy family recreational project on long winter nights by the blazing hearth. In this respect at least, my humble non-story thus carries the false promise of joining some of the more well-beloved winter tales of Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorn. But, being a non-story, whatever promise it carries is headed elsewhere.
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At this stage of the game, Shannon, where that elsewhere might turn out to be is anybody's guess. Antonya Nelson's father, Dr. Nelson, who served as a mentor and kind of second father to me throughout my undergraduate years, used to relate the famous anecdote about Ernest Hemingway's being asked by a woman at what point it was exactly when he inserted the theme into his stories. Dr. Nelson's Hemingway anecdote is funny because theme is, of course, not something which a fiction writer "inserts" into his or her story. With a memoirist of the non-story, it works somewhat differently.
I've often said, over the two years that I've been constructing The Toolmaker's Other Son, that this memoir of mine is already roughly 75% written. That's because so much of its substance consists of what I personally consider to be Galen Green's Greatest Hits. In other words, what I believe to be my hundred or so poems, prose poems, song lyrics, etc. which best tell (And here comes that word again!) the story of my life -- even though my memoir is to be "about," for want of a better construct, my "inner" rather than my "outer" life. (Please to forgive the unintended Platonic false dichotomy implicit here.)
Thus, whatever detectable "theme" emerges, as one peruses -- in some best of all possible futures -- the final 400-page hardbound version of The Toolmaker's Other Son, will have been the product of the stylistic, structural, organizational decisions you're witnessing me struggling with at this very moment. Hence, I suppose it would be arguable that I'm engaged in the laborious process of "inserting the theme" into my memoir at this very moment. With this in mind, I cannot but hope against hope that The Toolmaker's Other Son will turn out to be greater than the sum of its parts.
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This, then, is the sort of finished product I've had in mind now since the late summer of 2005. That's not to say that it's the same finished product which will, Providence willing, sometime within my lifetime, appear in our hands, as well as upon the bookshelves and reading tables of the world's thousand most discerning literary critics and sociopolitical opinion-makers. Nor is it to say, by any means, that it'll bear much resemblance to my conception of it in its numerous earlier incarnations. It's not; it won't.
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By now, I've resigned myself to the ineluctable fact that the theme of whatever book I end up constructing from out of all this toil and moil and quasi-divine inspiration is simply not going to be an entity nor a property nor a substance to which I can give a pronounceable name and then insert into my book the way they inject the cream filling into a Hostess Twinkie or the butter into a Butterball Turkey. If, peradventure, it could somehow be just such an injectable, I frequently ask myself what pronounceable name I would choose to give it, before the magical insertion took place. Here's just one of the answers I find myself giving myself in response to that colossal hypothetical:
Trust only in the evidence.
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Now that The West Wing has no new episodes with which to seduce, comfort and educate me, my favorite fictional protagonist on any regular network television series is Gil Grissom, Ph.D. on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. While I can identify with Grissom (portrayed by William Petersen) only perhaps 87.3%, that's still twice as much as I can identify with any other currently syndicated fictional character (with the possible exception of Lisa Simpson on The Simpsons). Whenever Grissom is asked why he's a CSI, he responds, "Because the dead can't speak for themselves." This is one of his favorite quotes and he uses it frequently.
Like me, Dr. Grissom worships (metaphorically speaking) at The Alter of the Evidence. He's a forensic entomologist, as well as the night-shift supervisor of the Clark County, Nevada CSI forensics team, investigating crimes in and around the city of Las Vegas. He was born (something that can't be said for every fictional character) in 1956, is a lapsed Catholic, can read lips and knows sign language because his late widowed mother was deaf. Growing up, he was an avid reader and an amateur scientist, who financed (I love this part!) his first "body farm" with his winnings from a high stakes poker game.
Early CSI episodes revealed Grissom to be witty, enthusiastic and quirky scientist with a good sense of humor. He's always been portrayed as the father figure of the team, the leader who can be perceived as cold and emotionless, but who is fiercely loyal to his CSI's and passionate about his work. In addition to being somewhat of a polymath beyond his career training, he's proven to be a very cultured man on many occasions, having a wide knowledge of history, literature and art.
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And with that, Shannon, I’m afraid I’m going to have to come to a sudden pause. It seems that Marie & I are having unexpected computer problems. (Are there any other kind?) And I don’t want to run the risk of losing what I’ve written to you here thus far. I fear that I’ve yet to arrive at the intended place in my ramble where I could have truly spoken from within the heart of the heart of the song. But it seems that this unforeseen turn of events will necessitate my presenting you with a rain-check. Meanwhile, here’s yet another song lyric from my distant past. Hope your holiday season is one of comfort and joy.
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
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Coda:
Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Once I was caught in the mad flow.
My life was but a walking shadow
On its way to dusty death,
I dreamed of Lady Macbeth
In the dusty street of Colorado,
Where I dreamed of breathing her dying breath.
My heart was once full of worry,
So full of sound and fury,
Like a tale told by an idiot.
I was always stopping to pity it
Until I crossed the wide Missouri
And washed the pain from my pretty cut.
Chorus:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
My life will be but a walking shadow
In the dusty streets of Colorado,
A tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing
But arising in the spring
Signifying nothing
But arising in the spring
Signifying nothing;
But I don’t let it bring me sorrow.
No, I don’t let it bring me sorrow.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in its petty pace;
But I don’t let it bring me sorrow,
Not even when my fingers trace
The neighbor’s flowers I had to borrow
To fill my broken vase.
The streetlights of Colorado
Will light my way to dusty death.
My life is but a walking shadow
That fades a little with every breath;
But I’m not gonna let the mad flow
Drag me under like Lady Macbeth
(repeat chorus)
My life began in Missouri,
It’s a tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury;
But now I’ve learned not to pity it
And now I’ve learned not to worry
About the salt that’s in my pretty cut.
I beg and steal and borrow
To keep away the sorrow
That creeps in its petty pace
Like the fractures in my broken vase
As tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Carries me away without a trace
(repeat chorus)
Words and Music by Galen Green c 1978
/gg
mythoklast@mailstation.com
msmith2210@aol.com
Kansas City, Missouri
Wednesday
December 05, 2007
(my late grandfather, Will
McCall's 140th birthday)
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From Within the Heart of the Heart of the Song
%%%%%%%
Let your mercy spill on all these burning hearts in hell,
if it be your will to make us well.
And draw us near and bind us tight,
all your children here in their rags of light . . .
-- Leonard Cohen, from "If It Be Your Will"
on Various Positions (album released 1984)
%%%%%%%
It's not ignorance does so much damage; it's knowin' so derned much that ain't so.
-- Josh Billings, American Humorist
(born Henry Wheeler Shaw, 1818 -- 1885)
%%%%%%%
I heard it in the wind last night
It sounded like applause
Chilly now
End of summer
No more shiny hot nights
It was just the arbutus rustling
And the bumping of the logs
And the moon swept down black water
Like an empty spotlight
-- Joni Mitchell, from “For the Roses” (1972)
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Dear Shannon (& Co.),
Welcome to the seventh installment of my memoir within a memoir. As always, I hope that all's well with you and yours. Thanks for your thoughtful suggestions and kind comments. I appreciate that very much. Please know that I understand perfectly well how busy you are and that you're not likely to have the opportunity to write to me all that much in the near future. Truth to tell: I wouldn't have been able to pour forth to the extent that I have in recent weeks, were it not for an uncharacteristic convergence of favorable circumstances at work. Because I realize that this bit of good fortune is inevitably in limited supply, I’ve been making every attempt to “make hay while the sun shines.” Please be assured that this rate of flow isn’t likely to remain steady for all that much longer. If by some miracle, however, it does, then please accept my eternal gratitude for your having provided me with just the right “audience” to impel me into accomplishing a long overdue step toward make The Toolmaker’s Other Son make clearer sense to a more general audience. Thanks!
Having been in “talk therapy” from time to time, particularly back in the 1980’s, for a few months here and a few months there, I’ve had a meager amount of practice in telling my life story in a relatively few words. But I don’t feel as though I’ve ever been very good at it. This probably has to do with my having been raised by an adoptive mother and father both of whose families of origin were quiet country people. (Both the Greens and the McCalls would have fit quite comfortably into Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegone, Minnesota. Remnants of the breed, in fact, still haunt a few of the houses and Methodist churches of Franklin and Osage Counties in northeaster Kansas.)
I mention this narrative shortcoming on my part only by way of prefacing my contemplating making a sort of “dry run” at telling my life story – or at least at talking about telling my life story.
Every life is a story. And every life story is worth telling, but not necessarily all for the same set of reasons. I seriously doubt that, for me, the telling of my story (or of significant portions thereof) would have ever in this lifetime drifted to near the top of my “to do list,” i.e. my long-term priorities list, had I not turned out to be, for an inordinate number of scoundrels and charlatans (vipers and scorpions) such an attractive target of slander, libel and all manner of calumny and fraud.
Moreover, I firmly believe that, in the process of "setting the record straight" (as the cliché goes), I may be able to serve as a paradigm case study to at least a few of the millions of hapless folks in similar situations. In other words, I've set out to compile The Toolmaker's Other Son, at least in part, as a tool for building solidarity among those folks whom I believe need a revitalized solidarity the most.
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On several occasions in the recent past, I've sat down with myself and taken a stab at organizing the chronology of my 58 years here on earth so as to make it make sense to a relatively disinterested reader. Thus far, however, I've been pretty dissatisfied with the results of every such effort.
A couple of autobiographers who seem to have worked out within themselves some mode of stylistic compromise which both informs and entertains with relatively harmonious balance are Bob Dylan and Henry Adams. Dylan is sometimes anecdotal and sometimes a straightforward chronicler, in the first (and so far only) volume of his Chronicles. Adams, on the other hand, tends to tend toward the philosophical, toying coyly with his reader's perfectly natural curiosity about the aristocratic lifestyle of a man most famous for having been descended from famous Adams ancestors. While the organizing principles employed by both Adams and Dylan are admirable and even inspiring, they'll likely prove to be of limited utility to me. That's because I'm a relative nobody, compared to Adams and Dylan.
Nowadays, of course, both the most entertaining and the most illuminating autobiographies usually take the form of fiction. Two examples of what I have in mind in saying this are the novels of Philip Roth and Antonya Nelson. * Roth's works you're likely already somewhat familiar with, if only by reputation. Tony Nelson's novels and short stories you may be less familiar with, although you knew her family -- at least tangentially -- and perhaps even brushed up against her when she'd have been a very young girl growing up in Wichita. You may have even babysat her. I know that I did.
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* Antonya Nelson (b. 1961) is an American author from Wichita, Kansas. She received an MFA from the University of Arizona and has published four collections of short stories, some of which have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper's. She received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2000.
Nelson is the author of five short story collections, including Some Fun (Scribner’s 2006), In The Land Of Men, and three novels (Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. Her books have been New York Times Notable Books of 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002, and she was named in 1999 by The New Yorker as one of the “twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium.”
She is the recipient of the 2003 Rea Award for the Short Story, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas.
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Do you remember James Nelson from Brooks Junior High? (If not, check the yearbook, if you still have it. I don't.) James is our age. And although he was markedly different from me in temperament and taste, he and I became close friends by the 9th grade. As with the late Danny Butcher (et al.), he'd attended Carter Elementary.
Eventually, I hope to write an entire chapter (perhaps 10 or 20 pages) on my long and extensive connection to the Nelson family. I suppose that it'd be safe to say that it all began with my bonding as buds with James, who subsequently invited me over to their house on several occasions, probably in 1963 or '64 to listen to his impressive collection of (mostly) automotive related LP's. For our younger readers: Those were 12" vinyl phonograph recordings. Each one held approximately 45 minutes of music or other prerecorded sound. They represented cutting edge audio technology during the period from perhaps 1960 thru 1980. Without them, there'd have been no Beatles. And again, for our younger readers: just think of The Beatles as Sir Paul McCartney's first back-up band. And, for our much younger readers: Sir Paul McCartney will probably be best remembered as the golden throated composer and singer of such popular classics as "Yesterday" and "Hey Jude" -- as well as for having been, for 30 years, the husband of the late Linda Eastman McCartney, whose fine line of vegetarian frozen foods can be found (as of this writing) in America's better supermarkets.
Anyway, Antonya Nelson is James Nelson's sister -- or, more precisely, half-sister. As you can see from the footnote (below) which I stole from Wikipedia, Tony is 12 years younger than us. At the time she was born, their family was living on Gentry, across from Fairmount Park, maybe 3 or 4 houses from the corner of Gentry & 16th Street. Did you know any of them back then -- you or your brother or parents? Although I first met the late Dr. Bill (F.W.) Nelson and his lovely second wife, Susan -- Tony's (& David's & Julie's) mother -- way back in the mid-1960's, I didn't really get to know any of them, except for James, until 1968. By then, they'd all moved to the large white stucco house on the southwest corner of 1st Street & Roosevelt in College Hill. I actually lived with them from March until June of 1970 (a long story in itself) and "babysat" Tony, the budding novelist, and her younger siblings, on rare occasions.
I hope you'll forgive my digression from the theme of today's ramble, which is supposed to constitute my contemplation of how I'll end up structuring The Toolmaker's Other Son. As I was starting to say: Nowadays, both the most entertaining and the most illuminating autobiographies usually take the form of fiction, of which Tony Nelson's excellent novels and short stories present us with useful examples; although, in the case of Tony's writing, as with a significant proportion of fictional writing overall, such stylistic concepts as "thinly veiled" and "loosely based upon" frequently apply.
I say this only because of my own observations drawn from my aforementioned extensive connection with her family of origin throughout the 1960's & 70's. I'm tempted to provide you with a few illustrative details; but, to do so in this context, would necessitate my violating one of the guidelines I've laid down for myself as a memoirist, and that is not to make life any more difficult that it already is for any of the people in my past who may still be above ground. While this degree of self-imposed punch-pulling goes against my overall nature and represents a compromise of several others of my guidelines as a memoirist, it simply makes a lot of practical sense when contextualized in "the great overview." However, suffice it say that, when Garrison Keillor reminds us that that child in any given family who grows up to write about his or her childhood and family never tends to be the most compassionate nor the most fair-minded child in the family, he could easily have had Tony Nelson in mind. Let's leave it at that.
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In much the same way that the renowned fiction writer Antonya Nelson weaves reminiscences and reflections from her past observations and experiences into the stuff of story, so her former babysitter and family friend Galen Green weaves his reminiscences and reflections from his past observations and experiences into the stuff of non-story. What I mean, in this particular context, by the term "non-story" might most accurately be equated with "critical analysis," a term not remotely as "sexy" as words like "story" or "fiction." Thus lacking in sex appeal (in the marketing sense of that term), critical analysis must needs find compensatory avenues into the hearts and minds of any potential readership it hopes to entice.
In other words: Why would an otherwise totally disinterested occasional reader of The New Yorker (or of The Kansas Quarterly, for that matter) or of Philip Roth's novels -- or occasional listener to the music of Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan or J.S. Bach -- or occasional patron of art house films (or Woody Allen films -- or whatever) . . . why, oh why, would such a prospective reader of The Toolmaker's Other Son . . . bother to give this memoir of mine the time of day?
While I'll readily admit here that I may be deluding myself in this, I can actually think of several reasons, off hand, several motivating factors. The first of these, paradoxically, is the flip side of what it is that's likely to drive the average reader of memoirs away -- or at least to keep the disinterested disinterested. We might most bluntly call this factor "the nobody factor." To wit: "What the heck makes this complete nobody think that a busy, educated, discriminating reader such as myself would have the least bit of interest in reading a book about his life and times?" This type of perfectly natural reaction, however, conceals precisely the preconsciously prelogical attraction which has been known to sell more than a few books by other ostensible nobodies. Let us abbreviate this attraction semi-accurately as "curiosity" and then move on.
A second potential motivating factor which might "put some butts in those seats" (as we say in show biz) we'll call "the solidarity factor." Surely I was not the only 20-year-old hitchhiker traveling from New York City to New England (and, in my case, points north), in August of 1969, to make the conscious, unfashionable and eminently sane decision to skip Woodstock (the legendary music festival) -- just as I (and thousands like me) had gone out of our way to forego attending the insane war in Indochina. My point here being that I'm not the only tree-hugging folksonging secular humanist tax-and-spend liberal Democrat with a mind (and a conscience and an imagination and a philosophy and a theology) of my own. And I'm banking on at least a handful of my soul mates out there in Toyland feeling just enough of a tug of solidarity with the subject/author of The Toolmaker's Other Son to cough up the price of theater ticket to wallow a while in said solidarity.
Even though there are several other motivating factors which could have the potential for selling more than a handful of copies of my memoir-in-progress (and which, in turn, help to motivate me to keep on cranking it out, inch by toilsome inch) I'm going to bother you here with only one more, a third. I guess I'll call it "the genre factor," mostly due to the fact that my memoir doesn't conform neatly to the accepted definitions of any of the genre one usually walks into a bookstore to look for. It refuses to fit neatly into any pigeonhole. It's certainly not a novel or a collection of poems or stories. Nor is it, strictly speaking, a conventional autobiography nor a philosophical treatise, a political manifesto, a theological discourse, a cookbook, a how-to manual, an edifying guide for troubled youth, an anthology of music, art or movie reviews, nor the confessions of a fallen screen idol or disgraced sports hero.
And although it is constructed around the scaffolding of Galen Green's rather ordinary, rather extraordinary life story, The Toolmaker's Other Son doesn't presume to be the story of Galen Green's life. It's not the story of anything. It is, as has already been established, a non-story.
A preliminary introduction to The Toolmaker's Other Son, which I drafted in the autumn of 2005 (roughly two years ago, in other words), is largely constructed around the image of a colorful 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, its pieces dumped out onto the living room carpet to be put together as a cozy family recreational project on long winter nights by the blazing hearth. In this respect at least, my humble non-story thus carries the false promise of joining some of the more well-beloved winter tales of Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorn. But, being a non-story, whatever promise it carries is headed elsewhere.
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At this stage of the game, Shannon, where that elsewhere might turn out to be is anybody's guess. Antonya Nelson's father, Dr. Nelson, who served as a mentor and kind of second father to me throughout my undergraduate years, used to relate the famous anecdote about Ernest Hemingway's being asked by a woman at what point it was exactly when he inserted the theme into his stories. Dr. Nelson's Hemingway anecdote is funny because theme is, of course, not something which a fiction writer "inserts" into his or her story. With a memoirist of the non-story, it works somewhat differently.
I've often said, over the two years that I've been constructing The Toolmaker's Other Son, that this memoir of mine is already roughly 75% written. That's because so much of its substance consists of what I personally consider to be Galen Green's Greatest Hits. In other words, what I believe to be my hundred or so poems, prose poems, song lyrics, etc. which best tell (And here comes that word again!) the story of my life -- even though my memoir is to be "about," for want of a better construct, my "inner" rather than my "outer" life. (Please to forgive the unintended Platonic false dichotomy implicit here.)
Thus, whatever detectable "theme" emerges, as one peruses -- in some best of all possible futures -- the final 400-page hardbound version of The Toolmaker's Other Son, will have been the product of the stylistic, structural, organizational decisions you're witnessing me struggling with at this very moment. Hence, I suppose it would be arguable that I'm engaged in the laborious process of "inserting the theme" into my memoir at this very moment. With this in mind, I cannot but hope against hope that The Toolmaker's Other Son will turn out to be greater than the sum of its parts.
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This, then, is the sort of finished product I've had in mind now since the late summer of 2005. That's not to say that it's the same finished product which will, Providence willing, sometime within my lifetime, appear in our hands, as well as upon the bookshelves and reading tables of the world's thousand most discerning literary critics and sociopolitical opinion-makers. Nor is it to say, by any means, that it'll bear much resemblance to my conception of it in its numerous earlier incarnations. It's not; it won't.
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By now, I've resigned myself to the ineluctable fact that the theme of whatever book I end up constructing from out of all this toil and moil and quasi-divine inspiration is simply not going to be an entity nor a property nor a substance to which I can give a pronounceable name and then insert into my book the way they inject the cream filling into a Hostess Twinkie or the butter into a Butterball Turkey. If, peradventure, it could somehow be just such an injectable, I frequently ask myself what pronounceable name I would choose to give it, before the magical insertion took place. Here's just one of the answers I find myself giving myself in response to that colossal hypothetical:
Trust only in the evidence.
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Now that The West Wing has no new episodes with which to seduce, comfort and educate me, my favorite fictional protagonist on any regular network television series is Gil Grissom, Ph.D. on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. While I can identify with Grissom (portrayed by William Petersen) only perhaps 87.3%, that's still twice as much as I can identify with any other currently syndicated fictional character (with the possible exception of Lisa Simpson on The Simpsons). Whenever Grissom is asked why he's a CSI, he responds, "Because the dead can't speak for themselves." This is one of his favorite quotes and he uses it frequently.
Like me, Dr. Grissom worships (metaphorically speaking) at The Alter of the Evidence. He's a forensic entomologist, as well as the night-shift supervisor of the Clark County, Nevada CSI forensics team, investigating crimes in and around the city of Las Vegas. He was born (something that can't be said for every fictional character) in 1956, is a lapsed Catholic, can read lips and knows sign language because his late widowed mother was deaf. Growing up, he was an avid reader and an amateur scientist, who financed (I love this part!) his first "body farm" with his winnings from a high stakes poker game.
Early CSI episodes revealed Grissom to be witty, enthusiastic and quirky scientist with a good sense of humor. He's always been portrayed as the father figure of the team, the leader who can be perceived as cold and emotionless, but who is fiercely loyal to his CSI's and passionate about his work. In addition to being somewhat of a polymath beyond his career training, he's proven to be a very cultured man on many occasions, having a wide knowledge of history, literature and art.
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And with that, Shannon, I’m afraid I’m going to have to come to a sudden pause. It seems that Marie & I are having unexpected computer problems. (Are there any other kind?) And I don’t want to run the risk of losing what I’ve written to you here thus far. I fear that I’ve yet to arrive at the intended place in my ramble where I could have truly spoken from within the heart of the heart of the song. But it seems that this unforeseen turn of events will necessitate my presenting you with a rain-check. Meanwhile, here’s yet another song lyric from my distant past. Hope your holiday season is one of comfort and joy.
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
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Coda:
Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Once I was caught in the mad flow.
My life was but a walking shadow
On its way to dusty death,
I dreamed of Lady Macbeth
In the dusty street of Colorado,
Where I dreamed of breathing her dying breath.
My heart was once full of worry,
So full of sound and fury,
Like a tale told by an idiot.
I was always stopping to pity it
Until I crossed the wide Missouri
And washed the pain from my pretty cut.
Chorus:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
My life will be but a walking shadow
In the dusty streets of Colorado,
A tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing
But arising in the spring
Signifying nothing
But arising in the spring
Signifying nothing;
But I don’t let it bring me sorrow.
No, I don’t let it bring me sorrow.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in its petty pace;
But I don’t let it bring me sorrow,
Not even when my fingers trace
The neighbor’s flowers I had to borrow
To fill my broken vase.
The streetlights of Colorado
Will light my way to dusty death.
My life is but a walking shadow
That fades a little with every breath;
But I’m not gonna let the mad flow
Drag me under like Lady Macbeth
(repeat chorus)
My life began in Missouri,
It’s a tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury;
But now I’ve learned not to pity it
And now I’ve learned not to worry
About the salt that’s in my pretty cut.
I beg and steal and borrow
To keep away the sorrow
That creeps in its petty pace
Like the fractures in my broken vase
As tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Carries me away without a trace
(repeat chorus)
Words and Music by Galen Green c 1978
/gg
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