Weighting for Godot to really get high
This image, made circa 1970 is faces of people waiting for the man with his back to the camera to roll a joint. When I see this image I always wonder is this how people look before they get stoned. And what does it have to do with anywayanything? Maybe they are waiting for Roivas.
In the 1960′s while an undergraduate I had a speech class. The instructor, Robert, who was a very bright and I became kind of intellectual friends, we enjoyed talking with each other about intellectual things. During that time I was known on a a somewhat conservative campus int he mid west to be active against the “government’s actions regarding Vietnam” and there was another faculty member in the speech department who was very supportive of the administration, very anti-liberal (thought I am not really a liberal‚ and he and I had some (formal) public interactions on this issue.
On the day that I was to do my extemporaneous reading in class Robert had to be absent and the conservative faculty took his place. I had chosen to read a section of a book titled “The Journal of Albion Moonlight” by Kenneth Patchen. The time was WWII, the scene was a local draft board and Albion is confronting the draft board over the morality of war. I have since lost my nice original edition hardback version of the book and also a couple of paperback versions I had bought along the way, so I cannot look up the passage. If I remember right there was a comparison between the draft board and a whore. However the substitute teacher refused to allow me to finish the reading and gave me an “F” grade.
Back then “The Journal” was a book that confused me, made me think, and gave me a general wonderment at how Patchen used the words and who would publish a book like this. Patchen also wrote and illustrated poems, many which I have found to be really fun to read out loud. UC Santa Cruz has an archive collection of his work which I saw on exhibition once when I first came to California.
Today I came across this reflection on “Albion Moonlight” and Patchen by JC Hallman at the Tin House Blog. I do not think in my life that I ever met someone who read the book (except the woman who gave me my first copy in the summer of 1964) and this could be the first time I came across someone who seems have had an experience with it at a similar time that I did. One other thing about the book that I remember was that on some pages in the layout Patchen had a second story going on in the margins and when the first few “Whole Earth Catalogs” by Stewart Brand came out, the pages had the products in regular catalog layout and a second story going on the margins.
In the book people are on a pilgrimage looking for a man named Roivas, which everyone points out is Saviour spelled backwards and which is something easy to say about the book. In JC Hallman’s essay he suggests it may not be a great book but he found an important experience in it. And I think he feels similar to me, what difference does it make in the end—its the personal experience.
Every bit as important as what a book means is what it does. In fact, I think I’d like to say that what it does is what it means. The great irony of literature is that our inability to describe what happens to us when we read a book is compounded by our intense desire to do just that, to share the experience with another as soon as we’ve had it. Books are private experiences, but we never want to leave them private.
I read once that Picasso said ”If a painting has one great thing in it, its Art.” I think if a painting or a book or poem or song affects you in a meaningful profound way, it doesn’t make any difference whether you can find a bunch of technical criticism about it, its still a great effort. and the meaning in your personal life is more important that what some critic or academic may have to say. A piece of Perfect Art sitting around by itself is doing nothing and has less value than a piece of Imperfect Art that moves someone’s life. It needs to be experienced, and when the experience is Real, in spite of any technical deficiencies its above the line.
One thing I like about the photograph is that three faces are (from the left) my friend Tom who I met in a pickup bar around 1964 in Port Chester NY, where he was alone in the middle of a political discussion with a bunch of drunk jocks who were ready to get physically aggressive— we met on a common ground and safely made our escape and became friends.. In the middle is a pretty wonderful ex-girlfriend and on the right is the guy who about a year and a half before had brought her over to my house on a date—it was love at first site.” When I look at these faces, waiting, it reminds me that life is a lot more than waiting for someone to roll up a joint, but that can be fun too.
Maybe the next time I am in a used book store I ’ll see if I can find another copy of “The Journal of Albion Moonlight.”