I Know It Sounds Absurd
Twenty-five years ago I read a poem to my actor friend Brad. We were sitting on the floor of a tiny, dim, threadbare theater on Hollywood Boulevard, on a break from rehearsal.
An unbearable silence followed. I flailed like a drowning man to imagine what he was thinking.
Finally, he said softly, “You should send your shit in, bro.”
I was twenty-two.
You should send your shit in, bro.
Those words have haunted me through my life like some implacable, supernatural itch. Only now, at forty-seven, have I dredged up the clarity and courage necessary to cut through thickets of neurosis and share my creations with any kind of consistency.
Back then forty-seven sounded like you might as well be dead. I had zero interest in the Blake of 2024. What did that hypothetical mummy, whose life was in any case long over, have to do with me?
Now that I am said mummy I confess I have less sympathy for my former view. Now I say that the waters of the soul must burst their underground basin and flood the world at whatever age, lest they stagnate and poison what’s left of one’s candle-flicker life.
Here’s one of my favorites from Jung:
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world — all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.”
In 1994 a sixteen-year-old kid sat under a tree outside Boise High and wrote. Students walked by and snickered or wondered. He wore a leather jacket and a Spanish wedding blouse and scrawled long, convoluted poems into his somehow-always-tattered journal. He crossed out a given line a dozen times, crammed revisions into the margins, crossed those out, and when he’d finally settled on the ultimate version, drew frenzied arrows to indicate where it was supposed to fit in the general welter of strikethroughs, chicken scratches, and spurts of light.
“What did the ancient ladies say to you?” Forget that. Six emphatic lines to cross it out. How about: “What have the Medusas of yesterday said to you from beneath their twisted veils?” Cross out with such vim that the ink bleeds onto the following page. Try again: “And what did the sad, gone witch of yesterday murmur from beneath her shredded veil?” Meh. Cross out with slightly less vim…
Et cetera.
At first glance it could have been the notebook of John Nash, that mad American mathematician. (If you haven’t seen the movie about his life, “A Beautiful Mind,” pull yourself together and watch it tonight lest you earn the reputation of a philistine, at which point I won’t be able to help you.)
When I look at those journals now, I’m struck by an unmistakable Something. To be sure, they’re full of weird stuff about elves and psychedelic hellscapes and leather-clad princes and spiritual warfare and of course LSD (never referred to explicitly but alluded to as “the lens-cleanser” or some such in the event Mom or the Boise Police Department should ever find occasion for a raid— not a far-fetched contingency given that I was fairly out of my mind and tended to pull stunts which justifiably provoked varying degrees of outrage {or terror}).
But I had a way with words. Even when they didn’t really mean anything, vagaries of a garbled adolescent mind, still they had a sound or feel or it. They were drum strikes, water tumbling, cadence.
But the point isn’t even so much that I was good at it but that I was engaged. I liked it. I was alive.
I’ve circled the world in search of myself, of who I’m supposed to be. I’ve sold out my own native intelligence the better to orbit sundry deranged mentors, gurus, saviors. I’ve meditated till my eyes fell out, and sat in therapists’ offices for twenty years. I’ve gotten so yogafied and deep-fried it would bend your mind. I’ve conquered Hollywood, played the lothario, rattled my soul on cocaine, lost everything, gotten a f*%$ing job, gone back to school, read a million things, meditated some more, become a teacher, gotten canceled, relieved BevMo of its Bourbon collection, proved every misguided soul on Facebook wrong, read more, meditated more, ever scouring scroll and street and sky for some final golden affirmation.
As Supertramp put it:
I know it sounds absurd
Please tell me who I am
But I always knew. I couldn’t admit it because I was scared of everything because excellent childhood. But I know who I am and always have.
I’m that kid under the tree.