BETRAYAL AND READING HENRY MILLER

wassily kandinsky

Today I've been filled up with a loving feeling for my four-legged friends and the winged friends. With that inner joy comes its balance, sorrow that the world I live in has so little use for anything living, even human life. After more than six thousand years of religion, the humans of the world still get their greatest kick out of killing. In the time I was new in the mountains, in awe of the natural world, I saw a blue heron in the lake one day. A lake here is a glorified pond made by a bulldozer, or bull-noser as they're known by the men who drive them. Later in the day, I told old man Tom I'd seen a heron. He said, "Kill it! It'll eat up all the fish in the lake!" I thought, All the fish? The bird isn't big enough to eat all the fish. It was passing through, saw a restaurant and dropped in. I did not kill the bird. The thrill of killing was one of the first characteristics I learned about old man Tom. His eyes sparkled when he told about killing something, anything. The thrill was the kill. I wondered how a man who talked about Jesus with genuine adoration, obeying God and love for God, can want to kill everything around him. In his later years he sat in an upstairs window facing his garden at sunset. I would hear a .22 rifle shot and know Tom shot another deer. He would wait for them to go into his garden he did not keep a fence around, shoot them in the belly with a .22 "so they'll go off and die." He didn't want them to fall down dead in his garden. Set up internal bleeding and they'll go away to die. He talked of it with fascination like he'd figured out something really special. He hated the deer. I asked him about the snakes in my first year. His answer, "Kill ever one ye see!" I didn't follow that counsel either.  

wassily kandinsky

Tom's brother, Millard, an old-timey Regular Baptist preacher. Brilliant man. Bible scholar. Truly inspired in the pulpit. Killing was his answer to solving problems. Seeing the evening news with him one evening, Iran and the Ayatollah issue was on. His recommendation: Nuke em. I said to him, You nuke this one you don't like, another one you don't like, there will come a day you've nuked everybody and you're the only one left. "That'd be all right." He meant it. I wanted to take it for humor, but it wasn't. He meant it. And it fit his character perfectly. Though he preached Jesus and love, outside the church love was a four-letter word and he didn't like hardly anybody. A Reaganista. The part that gave me pause was these are Americans from the traditional belief system of the time before electricity. These are people who call land "improved" when all its trees are cut down. Tom was not above pulling power on me to make me do his will. One example, I had a maple tree growing close to where I park. It was a nice tree. I liked it's color in the fall. Tom told me to cut it. I said no. He went to Ted Stern we were both working for and told him to tell me to cut it down. Really pist me off. I was told to cut it down because Tom wanted me to. After reasoning over it a day or two, I cut it down to keep peace and made firewood of it. Tom said he likes a place open. He can live in a damn desert if he wants to, but leave me alone about my trees! Next spring three sprouts grew up from around the trunk. I let the three maple trees grow in the place where there was one. The tree is even more beautiful now. This memory brings up a time he lied to me looking straight into my eyes. I told him I didn't believe it. He said, You calling me a liar? I had to say, Reckon I am. An intense moment. I did not see myself getting to my car alive. I did expect to be shot there and then. His eyes became shotgun barrels, and I felt like I was shot in his mind. I had nothing to do with him for four months after that. I couldn't even look at him I was so outraged by the betrayal. I thought we were friends after about five years. Turned out we were not. Ok. I never got over it. 

wassily kandinsky

I tend not to get over betrayal. It's not so much a principle I cling to, but deeper than that, down in that place I don't have a lot of conscious control over. Throughout childhood my mother betrayed me every opportunity. I learned early on I could not count on her. She taught me to lie to her. I became a private child. I couldn't count on either parent nor the church. I could count on school. School was my home. Loved going to school in the morning, hated going home. By the time I got into factory school, the fun of school went away. I've had a fondness for school, because that's where the love was in childhood, the other kids I was growing up with and teachers that really liked the kids. A second time, school put me on my feet by way of a small Southern college that was intimately small with a largely good faculty. I came to the mountains and moved into a schoolhouse. The house is the old Air Bellows school house. Now, in this time of the life, the place I call the home of my soul is a schoolhouse. I put all this together and see school in childhood was my refuge, and now in my adult life a schoolhouse is my refuge. My schoolhouse is loaded with shelves and stacks of books. At home with parents I was not allowed to read. If you got time to read a book, you got time to cut the grass, wash the car, wash the dishes. So I watched television. No consequences. As soon as I was in my first apartment, I stayed in and read as much as I could. It was like the dam broke. All I wanted to do was read. It's been that way ever since. I can't read Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum; that kind of writing spits me out before the end of the first page. Instead of turning to page two, I close the book. There is so much that is good, I'm unable to waste my time on pop testosterone fluff. Thomas Powers wrote a fabulous biography of Crazy Horse. I'm glad I did not miss Saul Bellows' Mr Sammler's Planet by reading some espionage nonsense of the day. 

wassily kandinsky

Something else I'm seeing the first time tonight, my adult life is characterized by reading. It's not the act of reading I like so much, but what I'm learning. I've been in cultures all over the world by way of reading. I read a nicely written novel from China and get a keyhole glimpse into the culture there. Reading takes me inside the minds of some brilliant people. Russian artist Kandinsky wrote two small books on art that taught me some important qualities of color that inform my every use of color. Poetry has been one of the great loves of my life. Reading it more than writing it. I have to thank Allen Ginsberg. He wrote in such a way a high school graduate could read it and feel like he got it, at least somewhat. Next, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the greatest introduction to poetry there ever was. I may have to find a biography of him. Everything I've seen about him over the years has told me this is an intriguing character, a man who truly took his own path and made it work for him. I still love his poetry. It blows my mind he wrote Coney Island of the Mind in the 1940s. Henry Miller's writing was astonishingly contemporary to today in the 1930s and 40s. He was writing in a place and time, but it's more like he was writing in that time, not of that time. His writing does not date. Nor does Ferlinghetti's. Miller's Tropic of Cancer made a sensation with its American edition around 1960. It was originally published in English in Paris, 1934, and I have a copy. It's still contemporary. I love Miller's writing. Reading him, I'm observing his thought process, his attitude toward life, his associations. I feel like he was so formative in my early reading life that now, diving into his mind again, I feel like what I'm reading was written by a close friend I understand well, just from reading his story. I admire his character. I admire the man. I admire who he is. I learn from him. Perhaps his most important message he had for his readers was to love your life and live it. Every page I read by Miller I'm in awe of his beautiful writing, how he tells a story, the freshness of his mind. If I'd spent my life watching television, I'd have never had the opportunity to know anything Henry Miller had to say. A tragic loss it would have been.  

wassily kandinsky himself

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SHANGRI LA HERE NOW

Kandinsky

 

A dove is pecking among the pine needles on the ground outside the window. Outside another window a dove is pecking for seeds the other birds missed during the day. They make me think of childhood living near the football stadium. First thing in the morning after a game the night before, I climbed the gate and scavenged the stadium, walking its labyrinth, each section of rows back and forth all the way to the top, then back down the next section. I often went home with maybe a dollar and a half average, maybe. Even pennies found were like striking gold. A quarter was a very big deal. People carrying popcorn trays up and down the aisles. Daddy or date or whatever, pays with bills and receives change, maybe a dime fell out of his hand while he was putting the change in his pocket. Questions like this played in my mind in bed at night. How did it get there? The forever unknown unknowable. It's a different world from the 1950s I went into age 8 and came out of the 50s age 18. Public school education. It was the late 40s and early 50s that I vacuumed the stadium with coin-detector eyes. In the middle 50s came rock n roll like a rocket taking off, a little slow at first and faster, faster unto now when it is round the clock everywhere. I'm remembering a woman from Raleigh I was talking with in the coffee shop with a Polish accent, she was from Krakow, the same place Roman Polanski lost his parents, his neighbors, his life when the Jews were rounded up. He was 8. He was slick and escaped. Found his way at night to the country and was taken in by a farm couple. The woman in the coffee shop noted she had a boy who was 8 and she wondered what decisions he is making for himself that will direct his life.
 

kandinsky

 

I carried that one home, have lived with it since, every once in awhile looking at self age 8, the best I was able, which wasn't much. An inward rebel. A kid seething with rage pretending not to be. A kid looking at globes in school for the farthest point on the globe. Alas, it was water. I wanted it to be Shangri La, like the movie. Not long out of high school I found a paperback in a drugstore rack, the Third Eye, by Lobsang Rampa. It said on the cover he was from Tibet. It was my first experience with anything Tibet. All I knew was Tibet equaled Buddhist monastery. I wanted to be in one. I wanted out of this crazy damn world and also knew I was nowhere near able to sit still and stare at a wall. I took Tibet, Shangri La, for a place I wanted to escape to. Television came into the house age 8. I saw a lot of Saturday documentaries and there was Lowell Thomas showing Tibet, which popped my eyeballs out of my head. In National Geographic I looked at pictures of Tibet as my ideal place, as far away from HERE as I could get. Here, of course, was wherever I was. I probably did not know, age 8, but as soon as I heard about Tibet and learned where it was located, I saw it was in the zone of opposite as I could get staying in the northern hemisphere. It was a childhood longing for escape from home and church. I dreamed of the day I would walk away, have my own life and drive a car with a playboy bunny air freshener hanging from the mirror. Dream on, dumb kid, it's not that simple. Dumb kid found out. I'm looking at before the finding out starts, waiting for the curtains in front of the movie screen to open. I absorbed Lobsang Rampa's book like a sponge. The life of my own experience began with a stumble and fall, slip on a banana peel, stumble into the wall. The word that characterizes the years 18 to 23 is confusion, confusion in a bewilderment way, befuddled. Everything was a mystery that everybody knew the answers to but me.

 

kandinsky

 

The Fifties were the Eisenhower years, the pre-Reagan republican time of Communist witch-hunts ruining and destroying the lives of far too many for conscience to allow. G-Men. Ideologues don't go by conscience. I remember the drills in first grade of crawling under the desk at school in case a Russian atomic bomb was dropped on us. Daddy worked at GM knocking dents out of cars on the assembly line, "a ding man." I remember recession after recession through the I-Like-Ike time, daddy getting "laid off" and finding a job driving a milk truck or driving a cab. In one of those times the guy he drove milk truck for repoed daddy's dream car, a 51 Oldsmobile that had nice lines. Borrowing money from loan sharks. An electrical line broke in a windstorm and a live wire landed on his Nash Rambler parked in front of the house and burned it up. He had bad luck with classy cars. I remember telling myself in that time I would never work for a big corporation where the employees are anonymous and expendable. I made the decision in childhood, in that time, that I would not bring a kid into this world, would not be married, would live alone all my adult life by choice. A subject I'd think about in the night, longing so much, longing with all my child's might never to repeat this kind of family experience. Debt and church, union strikes and recessions. I said I will not live my life like this. I determined that I would live simply without ambition for money. During the Fifties, a boom time for media, construction, war and manufacturing, a time of progress, the fiction of Graham Greene, which I did not know about at the time, the world I lived in was devoid of anything of interest to me. At school we took a bus to the Nelson art museum in Kansas City. I was in awe with no idea why. Never saw another museum until after leaving parents. The Fifties was when propaganda was the norm, like now. Then, we made uncertain jokes about being wire-tapped hearing an odd click or something on the telephone. All my life I've known to watch everything I say and certainly never use the word communist, and now it's bomb. Propaganda reality.

 

kandinsky

 

In the last year of college was corporation day when corporate recruiters visited the campus to make job offers or whatever. I didn't even step on campus that day. It was the corporate indifference for the individual human being. The corporate world is sharp-edged as a chef's butcher knife. I like a world with soft edges. I like working for individuals or small business. It doesn't pay, but I don't want the pay. Something else I learned in childhood was it's money or time, which is my choice? I chose time. Everybody around me chose money. I can't say I did anything big deal with my time, but I can say I've enjoyed my time. I never made more money than immediately necessary to get by on, didn't want more. I could have if I'd wanted to stay in a city. I could have here in the rural world, but didn't want it. Felt like money was a form of exchange, but could not live with only money in my mind. I've been seeing the corporate takeover of our government since that time. I've seen it evolve into what it has become, a wasting of the continent's resources and a wasting of its people, especially the working class, regarded by capitalists as the enemy. It's why I live on a rural road to nowhere. In childhood my comfort was a vast acreage of woods behind the house. Another comfort was grandmother, whose culture I live in on Waterfall Road. School was a comfort too, it kept me away from home. I live in the old Air Bellows schoolhouse. Thus, I suppose, education became important as a significant comfort. I've moved into a world composed of the comforts of childhood, made those comforts into a way of life. It worked then. It works now. It is Air Bellows Mountain where I found my Shangri La.     

 

kandinsky

 

 

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