Braiding (6)

I have come to realize, nobody can possibly tell the true story of his life. How do you put a quart of material into a pint of words? It can’t be done. Life comes at us all at once, and all the time. When we come to try to describe it, we have to look at this or that; first this then that. We try to sketch logical sequences – necessarily – but this is so inadequate. Life is so much more than logic, so much less understandable than sequence. Describing what happened to you, and why, is like playing chess with half the pieces invisible.

Thus, in the past few posts I sketched four major events that followed immediately after college: a job as news reporter, Dave Schlachter’s death and its aftermath, my discovery of Colin Wilson, and an experience with mescaline that opened my eyes to the world. But how much it leaves unsaid!

• Love, marriage, and a honeymoon in New England
• Early married life in Vineland
• Dabbling in local politics in the spring of 1970
• Six weeks in Europe, my first time overseas
• A year in Iowa City (and an M.A. with thesis in nine months)

Each of these themes could easily support a post or three, because each of them had something to do with my development. But do they bear directly on how my life went from whatever it was to whatever it is? Not really. I mention them here only to remind myself, and you, that most of our lives go unexpressed. Not everything we talk about was important. Not everything that was important can be talked about. What’s worse, we don’t always recognize the fact. I certainly didn’t.

For instance, three of the most important people in my life: Henry Thoreau, Carl Jung, Colin Wilson. In 1970, Thoreau had been dead 108 years, and  Jung, 9 years. Colin was very much alive, but it would be another 25 years before we met. At the time, the three were just names to me; yet in many ways they were closer than the people around me.

• Henry Thoreau. It was my wife’s idea to visit Concord, Mass., and Walden Pond. At the time I knew Thoreau’s name, and nothing more. A year later, in graduate school, my thesis supervisor, after hearing my over-ambitious idea about metaphysical thought in American life, suggested first that I look at the recently published journals of Bronson Alcott, then said, almost as an afterthought, that I might look at Thoreau as a  sort of  community of one. Alcott’s journal was huge, and I scarcely looked at it. But I picked up Walden and was immediately entranced. This man and I were on the same wave-length.

I found his journals and examined his thoughts from 1837 to 1847 – that is, from age 20 to age 30 – and wrote my thesis on his early social views in light of his personal religion. (I may post that thesis here at some point.) After I got my M.A. and decided against continuing for a Ph.D.,(what would I do with it?), I thought I would write more about him. (My wife gave me as a splendid birthday gift the two-volume Dover edition of Thoreau’s journals, which remain a prized possession.) An unexpressed theme in my life from 1970 was a continuing process of discovery, book after book, by him and about him, that would lead to Emerson and others. But where would this thread show in the braiding? It wouldn’t, yet it was as real and as important to me as anything external that happened.

• Carl Jung. While my wife and I were traveling in Europe, I bought Modern Man in Search of a Soul, and again, the man spoke to me. I didn’t know anything about psychology. I knew the names: Freud, Jung, Adler, and nothing else. Yet as soon as I began reading Jung, I somehow knew, here was a teacher. As with Thoreau, Jung’s books continued opening doors through the years. Just as, in my mescaline experience, I somehow intuitively knew what I was doing, so I knew what Jung meant, and sensed things (rightly or wrongly) that he didn’t quite say.

Had anyone told me that 36 years later I would experience direct mind-to-mind contact with this great man, I would have scoffed. And when it did happen, it was a little overwhelming. But by then I had spent years, off and on, following in his mental footsteps, book by book. Again, an invisible but crucial part of my day to day existence, even when months or years went by between readings, because of course we become what we take into our minds.

• Colin Wilson. And always there was Colin, expressing in so many genres. I came upon him first in a novel, but then went to The Outsider, which I suppose might be called literary criticism, though it is much more than that. Then, over the years, he poured his abundant intellectual energy into so many different molds: detective stories, science fiction, biography, philosophy, and – mostly – what we might call Examination of Life. If you’ve never read him you won’t know what I mean. If you have, you will recognize why it is impossible to describe the effect his work produces. He is continually saying, “Look at this and this and this. Now, look at them in light of this particular phenomenon,” and you’re off to the races. He makes you think. More, he gives you thing to think about.

Henry Thoreau writes about who we are, how we are to live, what are our possibilities.

So does Carl Jung.

So does Colin Wilson.

Now, imagine a life that is being continually enriched and disturbed by these three invisible wizards, and you’ll get a faint sense of another of the factors that was always nudging me onward. But I doubt if much of it showed. I was always happy enough to talk to anybody who might be interested, but they were few enough. One tires of baring one’s soul and being the recipient of a kindly (almost contemptuous, certainly tolerant) amusement.  One is easily cured of the habit of easy confidences.

But the fire burned within. I didn’t know where, I didn’t know how, I didn’t know what, but I did know that the life I led was unsatisfactory, and its unsatisfactory nature had little to do with social position or prestige or money or any of the things people seemed to value so highly. All I knew was that, whatever I had seen to date was not enough. My reading, my briefly drug-enhanced experience, my inner drive, all told me there was more somewhere, if only I could find it.