You wonder how these things begin.
Maybe it goes back to the eighth grade when Mr. Johnson asked us to prepare a project that would reveal our career choice. I remember that I didn't go to school for two days while I worked on this project. By this time I had published The Weekly Laff, the 205 Home Rumor, an ill-fated Boy Scouter, and the Nixon Whirlwind, the official publication of Nixon Junior High School. I would go on to be the editor of The Sandstorm, the official newspaper for Amarillo High School as well as work on the yearbook La Airosa. In college, I switched to music, composing musicals and arranging for a vocal quartet. I had left the world of letters for a romantic stint with music and higher education.
Now, almost 70 years later, I return to the world of letters and publishing with a vengeance. I'm not sure why this has become so passionate. Maybe it's because I find myself returning to a road not taken with a measure of regret for what might have been. Is it too late? Evolution is always at the point of Now, a natural transforming energy that prepares us for an ever new, ever becoming, moment of Being.
We are each working on the technology of ourselves, which takes us through metamorphic moments where destiny is defined as a perpetually transformative horizon that pulls us to the edge of Being without tumbling into a turbulent Black Hole swallowing reality. The technology of ourselves is our Choga, our DoJo where we strive to connect with the destiny of who we are becoming. Nothing changes this process---not even death.
There once was a prescient prophetess who was asked what would happen if she were suddenly shot to death while eating her apple pie. She replied that she would just go on eating her pie, and finishing it. Death only reveals the Truth of Being. It pulls back the curtains of deception so you can discover the permanent evolution of being yourself.
It is harder for me to pinpoint the exact year that I became a Whitman disciple. It is easier to remember when I became an O. Henry fan. My father collected books by buying them from estate sales liquidating the assets of deceased citizens. Consequently, he acquired a large amount of books. Among them was a best seller of 1906 entitled The Four Million, acquired from an estate of a Judge in 1944 when I was nine years old. Dad gave me that copy of short stories, and launched my fantasy of becoming an author.
As an aside, I suffer from Limerance, a disorder of a compulsion which was not officially recognized until 1979 when Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term after interviews with more than 500 people on the subject of love. Limerance is a condition of profound romantic obsession and persistent fantasy longing for another person, which can last a lifetime. My obsession was so severe that I invented identities, George and Jerome, and sent cards to the distant beloved from both identities. Of course, George Gershwin and Jerome Kern were my heroes at the time. I also identified with Beethoven and "his distant beloved," celebrated in his song cycle An Die Ferne Geliebte.
I discovered Walt Whitman in my junior year of high school. I had already been writing poetry and lyrics to songs. But Whitman brought the heady power of language as a tool of observation and discovery. I filled many pads and blank notebooks with poems. In my senior year I purchased a large blank green covered book that became my constant companion.
Every where I traveled my blank books were with me. I deliberately sought coffee houses, restaurants, and hangouts to write. Of course my distant personna played a role in how I observed and wrote. Feelings and experience became avenues for text, and I experimented and invented powered by inspirations of the moment.
After almost a decade of writing, I took my poems, now residing in many pads, tablets and notebooks, with me to New York. One careless summer day, I left this bag of poems in the subway, the seventh avenue IRT. I never got them back. Fortunately, the Green Book was not in the bag, but about 15 different sized pads filled with my poems were lost forever.
I knew I could only move forward as I continued my adventures in writing. I once spent an entire day walking from 125th Street to the South Ferry stopping in various coffee houses, taverns, and bars to write in several blank books. Most of the time I was on Broadway. At that time, I passed several haunts that had attracted Whitman, and I imagined him walking beside me as I hit the area once known as Printer's Square near City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge. Of course, the bridge was yet to be, and Whitman often crossed from Brooklyn to Manhattan on the Brooklyn Ferry.
Losing works that had been a record of my travel through time was a severe blow. I was depressed for months as I realized so much I had created was lost forever. Yet, I think my work became stronger, more insightful and original as I continued journaling encounters of my "being there" in the moment.
