Sunday, October 6, 2024
6:05 a.m. Blank, at the moment. Your move.
Talk a little about fame.
Yes, interesting how that bubbled up after I wrote about it. Sometime later that day I realized, as a boy I was obsessed with becoming famous. We used to play a board game – was it called Life? – that had you choose a formula, how much proportionately you wanted to acquire in life of Love, Fame, Money. The idea was, you’d shoot to achieve some ratio, say 30, 40, 30. I never cared about winning per se, but I would always set my goal impossibly unbalanced. I don’t know if I would try to achieve Fame 100, Love and Money 0 each, but something along those lines. I think it was my non-3D component trying to give me a clue as to what was important to my life plan, if it can be called a plan.
Not that I ever knew any practical path to fame. There were several potential paths, given my particular gifts, and many that could never have had a look in, given my particular deficits. But there was never the link I would have needed. It took a long time for that ambition to not only fade but be forgotten.
Only, look more closely. As a rule, you will find that things in a life that seem meaningless or disconnected, or that seem to have run into the sand, are nonetheless seamlessly connected to the rest of your life. How could they not be? Life often looks as if it proceeds by fits and starts, exploring this or that dead end, but when you look back you can see it is like sewing a seam (although less regular): The thread moves from top, in sight, to bottom, out of sight, but the thread is continuous and it is the up and down alternation that is its usefulness.
You’re saying sometimes we have to proceed behind our own back.
You don’t need us to tell you that. Your own lives will tell you, once you examine them for that characteristic. So, look more closely.
I’m beginning to get nudges. One I never thought of is that my incessant reading of history
But was it incessant?
No, I see that now. Would you like to tell it?
Your reading was much less directed than you remember it, and much less thought-about. Nothing surprising about either fact. You wouldn’t expect a boy to have the same preoccupations or even amusements as he would later. But, in fact, you were vitally part of a few pieces of American history for reasons it took you a very long time to discover.
Lincoln and the Civil War, yes. And World War II, which was only recently concluded, hence being written about.
But the boy was reading all kinds of work, forgotten by the man. Neither history nor biography had yet emerged from all the possible things that might attract his interest.
And I was even concerned with baseball, come to think of it, though I really knew nothing about what I was watching except winning and losing. But I remember now, it seemed to matter. Mazeroski’s home run in the ninth inning of the seventh game of whatever World Series that was, for instance. And the hapless Phillies, with their not very exceptional roster. But is any of this to the point?
Your life moment by moment is not very much like your life seen as a whole from after the fact.
No, I see the same thing in biographies. Telling it can’t help falsify how it felt to the person whose life is being described. Moment by moment takes so long, has so many hours to fill, has so many random or random-seeming things happening. Biographies don’t detail people brushing their teeth or putting on their shoes and socks, and if they did, who could stand to read about it? But life as we live it doesn’t have the silent fast-forwards that biographies do, and memories do.
And self-made summaries do. So what is the point of looking back and making the effort to recapture the feel of it at various times?
A binocular view, I suppose. We know how the movie developed: It is useful to remember how it seemed at the time.
Now, go back to the boy’s reading of history.
I realize, I always read history as if it was something at my level. I mean, I expected to be a history-maker, it was just a matter of growing up.
Did you have any reason to think that would happen?
It wasn’t a matter of thinking. It was assumed. I guess I thought everybody read history that way.
Just as boys casually assumed they would become baseball stars, or president?
Or astronauts, yes. And I still imagine that most boys did just that. (I hadn’t any idea what girls daydreamed.)
Now, this is useful background, mostly to send you back to the feel of those years. Does it shed light on your later career?
By God, it does, and I would have thought there wasn’t much I could learn about it. I see now, all of a sudden, that is what was behind my irrational assumption that I would go to the war, come out a hero, and enter politics, as Churchill and Kennedy had done. I have always wondered why I couldn’t see that my life and theirs had little in common. But now I see that that cartoonish plan was a stepping stone, a path connecting my childhood assumption that I would live a life among such matters with a way to get there.
Your astonishment is at the expense of your customary clarity.
Yeah, yeah. It’s clear enough. I pieced together what I thought was a reasonable flight-plan. Then Kennedy was killed and a few months later the Navy turned me down because I had asthma. No wonder I was so disoriented, directionless, coming home on the bus from the AFEES center. What was to be a path wasn’t actually there.
But you improvised anyway.
Totally without planning, too. No wonder I took such hare-brained moves. I was still following a path that was fundamentally disconnected from reason and therefore from criticism. I got married, got jobs, marking time until I could run for Congress in 1974, the bit of the plan that still survived, unconnected. I went to school for four years, too, and that wasn’t part of my plan.
You lived at two levels. Consciously you did what seemed sensible things. Jobs, college, marriage, jobs again, school again, and you were marking time. When the time came around, you were carrying out the plan nonetheless without much preparation, without knowing what you were doing, without much of anything except your brother’s support and your non-rational certainty.
And the odd thing is, it all worked out.
Nothing odd about it. You didn’t get the job you weren’t qualified for, but in effect your campaign was an advertisement for certain qualities that were recognized and rewarded, and you were on your way.
And this is just the kind of distorted summary we mentioned.
Can’t be helped. Feel free to describe every time you brushed your teeth.
That isn’t what I mean. I mean, it doesn’t mention my being taken by Colin Wilson’s book nor my sudden overwhelming drug-fueled breakthrough into seeing the world differently, nor my other ambition to write popular novels and make a lot of money so I could be independent.
It doesn’t mention your marriage nor your house-buying nor your putting up wallpaper nor your becoming a father, either. Shall we list the cars you owned, the telephone numbers you had, the grocery stores you shopped at?
I’m just mentioning it. It is as we said, life moment by moment is filled with so many things, and has so many movements to fill –
We keep saying, your lives and your ideas about your lives are not nearly the same thing. This is one more reason why: Memory compresses events, trends, daydreams, obsessions, and tries to make it all seem reasonable. Nothing wrong with the process, only don’t let yourselves be fooled into thinking that any one way of seeing is accurate. It is, at best, a pretty accurate summary of the view from a certain viewpoint. Change viewpoints and some things disappear from sight and others appear, and even the things that remain in sight probably look different.
Seems to me our theme has wandered all over the place today. What was our theme? I thought it set out to be fame.
Perhaps it is more the fact that your lives are a sort of balancing act.
We often feel that. You are setting it out in a different way.
- There is avatar-self at any given time, and
- Avatar-self at other times, that occasionally interact for reasons that may be opaque or anyway cloudy to you, and
- Your larger self that includes all these avatar-self versions, and has its own view of your life, and
- There is what could be thought of as “the self in the times,” meaning a sort of inertia that serves as a ballast for your life. But this is more than can be spelled out so casually.
Let’s begin with that next time, then. So, the theme?
“Many lives in one”?
“Life v. daydream”?
Life as a form of braiding, but we have used “braiding” in another context.
“Many lives in one,” then, unless I think of something else when I sit down to the computer. Thanks as always.
[In the event, I chose “Unseen threading.”]